Lot's of blogs these days are writing about Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince, hoping to lure in a few readers from search engines who are looking for Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince. At Ablogistan, we would never write about Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince just to boost our Google rankings. But it turns out, there is actually something interesting about Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince to write about.

Brought to my attention by the folks at Sadly, No! is an article at the Christian Worldview Network, a place that not only claims to be an antidote for Liberalism, but also for "Christian Happy-Talk." Personally, I prefer "Christian Happy-Talk" to the "Christian Fire-and-Brimstone-Angry-Talk" that seems to be growing. But to each his own.

The author, Jan Markell, has some problems with Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince, mainly all the FICTIONAL witches and wizards in the book. Let's take a look at a few particularly amusing exerpts:

"Chaos reigned in my home town July 16 at midnight. Little kids roamed the streets in ecstasy as they had just purchased the new Harry Potter book, "Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince." Most were dressed like witches and wizards. They are addicted, but not to righteousness. And they just want to be like Harry and, if possible, attend Hogwarts' School of Witchcraft. When told it doesn't really exist, they are heartbroken."

"Harry Potter is a wizard. Excuse me, but how many times does the Bible warn of us wizards, witches, witchcraft, sorcery, spells, incantations, and more?"

"So the Potter plot may be fantasy/fiction, but the setting and characters promote an occult-based worldview that kids accept as truth in normal life."

It's hard to know how to respond to something like this. You could start by countering that HARRY POTTER IS A FICTIONAL CHARACTER!!! WIZARDS, WITCHCRAFT, SORCERY, SPELLS, AND INCANTATIONS DON'T REALLY EXIST!!!

As far as children believing that the world of Potter is real, well, they also believe in Santa Claus, the Easter Bunny, and many other fictional *cough* invisible *cough* characters. I say, if kids want to practice witchcraft and wizardary, let them do it. It is harmless. It's not like they'll actually succeed. And if they do, then sign me up, because that's a helluva lot more interesting than anything I learned in 20 years of school.

But this is just isolated among a few radicals, right? Yes... if the newly appointed Pope can be considered radical. "It is good, [to] enlighten people about Harry Potter, because those are subtle seductions, which act unnoticed and by this deeply distort Christianity in the soul, before it can grow properly," wrote (then) Cardinal Ratzinger in 2003.

I don't see why Harry Potter is so different than the thousands of other movies and books in the fantasy genre. I mean, if you ban witchcraft and wizardary, you miss out on some great entertainment: Lord of the Rings, Willow, Wizard of Oz, Bewitched, and any movie every made by Disney.