Transcript:
Reddit r/harrypotter |
TL/DR: We have raised our almost 8 yr old daughter to believe she’s a Witch from an old Wizarding family. We’re looking for more sophisticated and creative ideas from the r/HarryPotier community to keep this thing going.
Since our daughter was 5 and my wife and | first started reading her the Harry Potter books we have told her that she is a witch and that the Wizarding World is real. She is almost 8 and as her questions have gotten deeper, we’ve kept building the illusion with more details about our family genealogy and its connection to book characters, stories about times we used magic (and the life and moral lessons we learned about it). She has processed many difficult subjects like racism, climate change and even the Coronavirus through this lens.
Before other parents judge or lecture :We know it’s gas-lighting and that eventually she’ll have be disappointed and have trust issues with us when she learns the truth. We justify it that we are adding magic to her childhood, and giving her motivation to reach her full (magical) potential (since she needs to study hard to be accepted to Hogwarts). We’ve asked serious questions of her teachers and they think it’s more awesome and creative than damaging. (At the very worst case, my take is that it’s analogous to children being raised to believe that traditional religious stories are true and that when the truth hits it will teach her to ask critical questions and not accept everything she hears or reads at face value.)
We’re looking for more ideas for how to inject little bits of Harry Potter magic into every day life using technology, crafts and adding more details to the fanfic that is our lives
According to Marx, religious belief is the masses seeking to find, in the realm of the ideal, the realization of their humanity that they are unable to achieve in the material world. “Religion… is the soul of soul-less conditions, the heart of a heartless world.” Thus faith is always a social rather than an individual phenomena. Thus, even if you take the strict atheist interpretation (and there are socialists who do not, such as the Baathists and Sandinistas) religion still has its roots in something positive: the creativity of the masses, and their striving towards “Chajusong,” or independence.
Stuff like teaching your daughter Harry Potter is real is quite different. Individualistic rather than a group phenomena, it ultimately just fosters narcissism. Plus, most religious texts are at least great literature, that wrestle on some level with fundamental human problems. Harry Potter is silly, pointless entertainment at best: it’s hardly the Bhaghavad Gita or the Koran. Telling your child that pop culture is the ultimate reality is enforcing upon her a shallow, anti-human view of life.
Lol, no. I’m with you on everything else you said, but can’t abide this nonsense.
Honestly, that’s really only the case if you get hung up on the fact that there are people still living who believe religious texts literally. Most of what you find in the Odyssey or the Gilgamesh epic is just as offensive to modern secular sensibilities. I maintain that if you approach, say, the Old Testament purely as an ancient epic written by people in the Bronze Age, a lot is very great art. The Book of Ezekiel, for example, is a powerful mix of surrealism and terrifying apocalyptic visions. I don’t know of anything comparable to it outside the Elder Edda. People who have read the Koran tell me it is some of the most beautiful poetry ever composed.
The idea, by the way, that religious texts are to be interpreted entirely literally is mostly a creation of the early modern era – as is the idea that such texts are absolutely central to religious doctrine. In the pre-modern period, religions were generally felt to subsist in a series of rites, rituals, and traditions; in other words, religion was recognized as a social phenomena. The sacred texts themselves tended to be recognized as disparate compilations, and were interpreted partly literally, but mostly symbolically and esoterically. Typically, only “adepts” such as monks and philosophers would really engage with them, and it was as much a spiritual as an intellectual practice. The absolute popularity of sacred texts only comes about with the invention of the printing press.