Reflecting on 2013

2013 was a busy year for me.  A lot happened!

To start with, I've had three jobs and three homes in three cities.  I started the year living at with my parents in Colorado Springs and working at the local Walmart as a cashier.  Quitting there in April without another job to go to, I was offered a position at the YMCA of the Rockies in Snow Mountain Ranch not one week later.  I returned to live on campus there in what is technically Granby, Colorado--but practically the middle of nowhere.  While working there as a janitor, I continued to seek work for an eventual move to Fort Collins, finding employment at JAX as a cashier.  This prompted another move at the end of Septemeber, to my present job and my present home.  I am happy with my job as it is now.  The pay, hours, and work are all good, and the employer is absolutely amazing, an inspiration of servant leadership in action.  My hope going into 2014 is to stay with this company in this city, though I may try to find other housing arrangements when my lease is up this summer.

The three moves necessitated three churches, which has made connecting with other Christians difficult, but I have made a few friends among my brothers and sisters that I'm proud to call my own.  Much attention throughout the year actually focused on one church, Summitview Community Church, which I had attended while in college.  At the beginning of the year, I was reeling from having been kicked out of a small group in that church's college ministry (the Rock) for a conflict which was supposedly all my fault.  The previous summer, I had found out that the conflict was largely due to emotional purity and leadership mishandling of the situation--and that the Great Commission Church movement of which Summitview is a part had confessed to mishandling similar conflicts in the same way over 21 years ago.  At the beginning of the year, I was on the "De-Commissioned Forum" made for and by ex-members of the GCC, including several newcomers from Summitview and the Rock.  While there, I stumbled upon an article by the current leader of the GCC, John Hopler, and took exception to it, contacting him to voice my criticism.  To my surprise, he responded and publicly apologized.  Hopler worked tirelessly to get me in touch with the pastor of Summitview and the people I had been in conflict with the year previous.  As a result of his efforts, I was put in touch with the leader who'd given me the boot and the young woman who'd thought it necessary to protect her emotional purity.  Both apologized and the work of repairing these broken relationships began.  Unfortunately, in late June any hope of restoring some semblance of Christian love and unity with the young woman was lost when she sent me a sudden accusatory email (wherein she alleged that I was harassing her by trying to be friends with her, which she'd said she wanted to be, and by trying to resolve a conflict between us she'd said was bothering her--but of course admitted it would not be harassment if I was a girl) and cut all contact between us.  Though fellowship with her was ruined, I still felt I had reconciled with leadership of Summitview and the Rock and could return to both without problems.  I was wrong.  The young woman was already a member of both and was unwilling to share mutual friends and relationships, and leadership was still quite willing to take her side under the dictates of emotional purity.  By the end of November, I realized that even though my own position had changed and I was willing to allow the young woman to ignore me and have no fellowship with me as she pleased, the leadership's position had not changed and the young woman's position had only crystallized beyond absurdity.  In a final meeting, positions on the understanding of God's will that the leaders had specifically disavowed only a few months ago were reaffirmed (specifically, the position that a Christian should listen to their peers and leaders moreso than the Spirit directly speaking to them).  I walked out of that meeting and left that church.  I posted a defense regarding the emotional-purity based accusations which had been made of me and began to seek a new church.

All of this led to a lot of spiritual and emotional turmoil for me.  As my posts this year reflect, God has been speaking to me consistently about the importance of love and unity and I have tried consistently to pursue these things with the young woman, the Rock, and Summitview.  I have learned the value of such love and unity in their absence.  I have also learned that achieving them is something that must be accomplished with conscious effort by all parties involved, or not at all.  One party was definitely not interested, and so unity was broken.  But that wasn't the only thing I learned.  I learned what sort of a man I am, what I'm capable of, and whom I follow.  I learned I am a good man, committed to love and unity, that I am capable of pursuing these causes far beyond the point where others would have given up, and that I follow God and none other, no matter what.  One of the leaders of the Rock said he was praying this would be a watershed decision for me, to build me up for days ahead.  I do not pretend to know what kind of character he was hoping for, but I am pleased by how my character has developed through my seven year trial.  It bodes well for my ability to face whatever is to come, I think.  Nevertheless, I am glad that the trial is over and that the Rock and the young woman are behind me now.

I move on to other trials.  Beginning in June of this year, I began to read the Book of Mormon, taking seriously its challenge to read and study it, and putting to the test its claim to be comparable to the Bible.  The Comparable to the Bible Series was born.  While the actual business of seeing if the Book of Mormon measures up to the Bible has been a dismal failure (14 posts and most of one book in, and I can already say with certainty that the Book of Mormon isn't remotely in the same league as the Bible), the business of writing them and reading the Book of Mormon has been a success.  I have grown tremendously in my appreciation of the Bible and Christianity by comparing them with their fraudulent counterparts.  Additionally, the business has now put me in touch with a number of Mormon missionaries and given me an opportunity to present the gospel to them.

In other writing news, I finished my draft of my first-to-be-published fantasy novel this year and put it up for Open Beta, gathering reader feedback in preparation for a round of editing this coming summer, followed by publication!  I am very excited about this.  In the wake of this project's completion, I've turned my attention to other ventures.  I've completed two Star Trek Online fan fiction stories, with a third underway, as well as a novel-length fan fiction for The Secret World (all of which can be found here).  I've also spent a lot of time working on worldbuilding and backstory for an original dystopian military science fiction.  I even have a partial draft for a short story set in that universe, which I plan to continue and finish.  Speaking of things I have plans to continue, there's my old webcomic, "Dragon Hunt".  Long neglected on the back-burner, I worked out a script for the rest of chapter 4 earlier this summer and found it again today.  On New Year's Eve I also managed to recover the critical files for restarting the comic.  I also know how to overcome the technical hurdles which caused it to stop being produced last time around (I could not get my computer to render crowd scenes, but now I can just make a bunch of separate renders of different people and combine them to get a large crowd).  The only thing left is actually sitting down and doing the renders and postwork--which means the adventures of Bill and Lia should be returning soon.

So looking back, 2013 was a busy year and a hard year in many ways, but overall, a good one.  I look forward to discovering what 2014 will bring!

Comparable to the Bible: Introduction

For full disclosure in starting this, I have to say that this is not my first encounter with Mormonism or the Book of Mormon and that I already have an opinion on the veracity of the Book of Mormon and how it stacks up against the Bible.  I do not think this in any way discredits me.  After all, the Bible and the Book of Mormon are both objective things.  They are either the similar or dissimilar from an objective standpoint, and this is something that a biased observer cannot simply change.  Also, if the Book of Mormon cannot persuade a skeptic who knows the Bible of its claim to be comparable to the Bible, it is truly a powerless book with nothing at all in common with the Bible (which has persuaded a good many skeptics).

The preliminary conclusion I have come to from previous experience and study is that the Book of Mormon is false--not at all comparable to the Bible--and that Joseph Smith, Jr., wrote it as a false prophet.  I have several reasons for believing this.

The first is that the truth claims of the Mormon Church (which claims to derive its beliefs from the Book of Mormon, among other sources) and those of Christianity at large (derived from the Bible) are incompatible and mutually exclusive.  They cannot both be true.  The foremost example is the Mormon theological claim that "as man is, God once was; as God is, man may become."  God, in Mormonism, is pictured as part of a lineage of gods, founding worlds, placing humans on them, and elevating them to godhood.  Not only may we become gods, but the god of Mormonism is himself a human from another world who, under another god, ascended to godhood--and the god under which he did that was once human too, ascending under some other god, etc, etc.  Whereas Christianity holds that only one God exists and that He has no beginning, end, or peers and is a spiritual rather than corporeal being, Mormonism states (though usually not explicitly--after all, for some reason Mormonism is trying to market itself as a mainline Christian denomination these days) that a nearly-infinite pantheon of gods and goddesses (they are said to reproduce in the normal human manner, in several Mormon sources) exist and that none of them have always been divine, just as no human has ever been always an adult.  The problem with this, aside from its obvious conflict with the strict monotheistic passages of the Bible (which do not allow for God to be the only god we have to concern ourselves with, but explicitly state He is the only God in existence, the only God that God Himself--who knows all things--is aware of), is that it is too much like generational human reproduction.  Though human population is vast, it is still not infinite.  Going back in time, each succeeding generation is smaller than the one before until one comes to a time when the very first generation came into being.  At that point, previous generations of humans cease to be a sufficient explanation for the existence of humanity: humans must have been brought into existence (along with all things) by an outside source: the First Cause (which, following the Cosmological Argument, is God, the God of the Bible).  Since the god (and gods) of Mormonism all have beginnings, they fall prey to the same logic: that is, at some point in the distant past, the first generation of the Mormon pantheon came into being and could not have done so without some external First Cause--thus, strangely enough, the gods of Mormonism require the God of the Bible to create them and be their God in order for them to exist.  This is one reason I feel quite at ease rejecting the god of Mormonism: even if Mormonism is true, the God I serve must still be real.

The second reason is the historicity of the Bible verses the Book of Mormon.  Both books make testable historical claims.  The Bible, for instance, says a great many things about the historical existence of Israel, about events that happened to it and in it, and about people, places, and technologies related to its history.  The New Testament further goes on to say a great many things about Jesus Christ, the times, places, and events He lived through, and about His followers after Him.  All of these and more are testable historical claims.  With the Bible, none of them have yet been proven false.  In fact, the Bible's historical claims have proven so reliable that it is used by many archaeologists as a guide, and all historians accept it as a legitimate primary source (that is, something written by a historical people regarding events of their time).  The Book of Mormon is quite another matter.  It also makes historically testable claims, saying things about the historical existence of the Lamanite, Nephite, and Jaredite peoples in the Americas, going on in detail about the events that befell them, the times and places that were important to their civilizations, and the technologies they possessed.  However, none of these testable historical claims have been verified and the vast majority of them have actually been falsified by the discovery of a gross number of anachronisms.  Not only is the Book of Mormon not accepted as a historical guide, but the Smithsonian Institute and the National Geographic Society have both issued statements disavowing its historicity.  It is simply not credible to accept it as a primary source, or a source at all.  In fact, the state of the historicity of the Book of Mormon is such that the book contains no maps, though maps in Bibles are very common.  The reason for this is that not even its staunchest supporters can reliably relate sites talked of in the Book of Mormon with known locations in real geography.  Occam's Razor dictates that the simplest explanation for the complete lack of historical evidence and many historical contradictions to the Book of Mormon is the most likely to be true: that is, there is no historicity to the Book of Mormon because its events did not take place in actual history, but are fictional.

The third reason is the absurdity of the concept of the Book of Mormon itself.  It purports to be a translation of a book written in "Reformed Egyptian" on plates of gold bound into a book form, as was the usual custom of writing in the culture that produced it.  Analysis of literate cultures and their writing habits shows just how absurd it is that any literate culture would use books of gold plates as their main mode of writing.  A great number of literate civilizations have existed throughout history and have chosen different mediums for their writing.  The Egyptians used papyrus--sheets made from pressed and dried pulp from reeds--, the Sumarians used clay, the Europeans used parchment (derived from animal hide), the Greeks used wax tablets, the Mesoamericans and modern people use paper--made from wood in much the same way papyrus was made from reeds.  Though inscriptions on metal from these cultures are not uncommon, they are not the normal way any culture recorded and preserved information.  Gold plates particularly violate several of the common features necessary to any writing material used as the mainstay of any literate society.  First, any literate society will not only write, but write a lot and so whatever they write on must be common and cheap because they will use a lot of it.  Gold has always been, and continues to be, one of the rarest and most valuable metals known to man, such that many societies prized it and used it as a medium of exchange.  Notably, the Book of Mormon even includes references to use of gold as a medium of exchange, which reduces the idea of the Book of Mormon cultures routinely writing on gold to the level of absurdity.  It would be like our culture commonly printing books on pages made of sewn-together $100 bills.  Second, these materials must be light.  Writings that are not intended for decorative or memorial purposes are going to need to be transported, stored, and used easily.  They will also consist of a lot of whatever the writing material is (rolls of papyrus, pages of parchment, tablets of clay or wax...etc).  The denser this material is, the heavier a book made of it will be and the more difficult it will be to transport and use.  Even a large book of paper sheets (which, individually, weigh practically nothing) can be prohibitively heavy to move.  This presents a huge problem for books made of any metal, but especially of gold.  All metals are much denser than any of the other materials used for normal writing, but gold is dense even for a metal.  Even a tiny book made of gold would have immense weight.  A lengthy tome of the material would weigh hundreds of pounds and be impossible to move and extremely difficult to even use (turning to the page you wanted would involve repeatedly lifting and moving dense metal plates, with a cumulative weight of several hundred pounds).  Third, these materials must be able to preserve what is written on them.  Papyrus, paper, and parchment are all excellent in this respect in that the act of writing on them permanently stains them.  Only immersion in water can deface such writing, and precautions against exposure to the elements are easily taken.  Clay is good, for it can and was hard-fired to preserve the writing, as firmly as if written in stone itself.  The wax tablets are perhaps the only exception to this, though the wax could still be preserved if care was taken in storing, moving, and using the tablets.  Gold, however, is a very soft metal.  Anything etched in gold will be easy to obliterate.  In this respect, it's very much like the wax tablets, except that it would be extremely difficult to take the necessary care to preserve writing etched in gold plates, given their extraordinary weight.  A sufficiently heavy book of such plates might even efface the writing in it under its own weight alone.  Finally, there's the matter of "Reformed Egyptian," a language that does not exist.  If the Book of Mormon were the product of a literate society that commonly wrote books in reformed Egyptian hieroglyphs on golden plates, we should be finding such books and such writings everywhere (literate societies leave a lot of manuscripts behind), but as it is, no such books nor any such writings have ever been found.  Again, the most logical explanation is that the Book of Mormon did not originate the way Joseph Smith, Jr., claimed but was, in fact, written by him.

Fourth, there is the common Mormon challenge that Joseph Smith, Jr., a teenager at the time, could not possibly have written the Book of Mormon in the alleged time period of three months.  I stand as living proof that this is not so, since as a sophomore in high school (age 15), I completed the manuscript for a fantasy novel in no more than three months.  Compared to me, Joseph had several advantages.  First of all, he wasn't writing in class, while simultaneously passing said classes with flying colors (I multitask).  He could devote his complete attention to the book.  Second, he was, by many accounts, dictating to another rather than writing himself, a method which would have proceeded much faster.  Third, much of the work was done for him.  Portions of the Book of Mormon are simply copies of the King James Version of the Bible, complete with errors unique to that translation.  The concept of the Book of Mormon was lifted directly from theories on the origins of Native Americans that were circulating at the time and published in A View of the Hebrews.  Joseph came from the "burned-over district" where theological discussions and preaching were common, so most of the ideas for the theological content could have been lifted directly from the discussions going on around him.  Very little of the book needed to be original.  Mine was.  Third, Joseph already had a previous draft to look back to, the "Lost 116 Pages."  This draft was written three years previous to the publication of the rest of the book and the first portion of the final book is simply (and explicitly) a rehash of this material, rather than (as I produced) and actual first draft.  Fourth, as hinted at above, Joseph did not complete the book in just three months, from concept to final product (as I did).  The Lost 116 Pages shows that Joseph had been working on drafting the manuscript for at least three years.  His own accounts place his first encounter with Moroni (which probably marks the first time he conceived of the book) in September of 1823, a full seven years before the book was completed.  I just recently completed a book that took me five years to go from concept to completion, and that's the longest I've ever taken, and I did it before as a teenager in just three months.  Surely Joseph could have done it in seven years.  Fifth, Joseph was not actually a teenager, as many suppose.  The Book of Mormon was published in 1830 and Joseph was born in 1805, which means he was in his mid twenties when he composed the book.  I am nearing that age now, and I have composed five large novels (the largest being 287,000 words, the four others not being far behind), two novellas, and numerous short stories--and your telling me all Joseph could do was write one 275,000 word manuscript?  Its not like it even needed to be his final draft, since the Book of Mormon would later go through 3,000 revisions.  Finally, when I have shared this with Mormons, they've said, "Well, could you produce something that would be an enduring work?"  I point them to Mary Shelley, who wrote the classic Frankenstein at 18 years old.  She's far from alone.  Motzart wrote classical compositions at 5.  Michelangelo painted famous works before he was 15.  Chopin was a well-known composer by 15.  Ernest Hemingway wrote one of his classics, The Sun Also Rises, while in his early twenties (remember Joseph didn't publish his work until his mid twenties).  Wilson Rawls wrote the widely acclaimed Where the Red Fern Grows in three weeks.  Christopher Paolini wrote the 500+ page bestseller Eregon at 15.  "But do people believe any of those to be the word of God?" a Mormon once replied.  No, because none of the above were deluded or twisted enough to try to pull such a deception off.  However, what we know historically about Joseph and his family's reputation indicates that he was.  Also, others have been.  The Quran is of similar length to the Book of Mormon and issues a similar challenge in an effort to prove its divine origins.  His following is much, much larger than Mormonism and is the second largest religion on Earth.  There have also been numerous more modern works, some, such as Christopher Nemelka's Sealed Plates that attempt to do the same thing.  Their success or failure remains to be seen.  Certainly, Joseph Smith, Jr., could have done it.

Finally, there is the matter of spiritual experience.  To myself, spiritual experiences--given their inherently subjective nature, are the least reliable source of proof.  If they contradict objective facts, I do not think they can be taken as proof at all.  For instance, there are people out there who feel very strongly that the Earth's axis of rotation is changing, but since objective facts say it is not changing and, in fact, cannot change, their subjective testimonies are thereby falsified.  However, from talking with Mormons I've gotten the impression that, when it comes to the Book of Mormon, they feel the opposite is true.  Even if the objective facts say the Book of Mormon is not and cannot be true, they have a subjective spiritual "testimony" that it is true, which invalidates the objective facts in their minds.  So, I will set forth my subjective spiritual experiences as proof of equal weight, even though I would otherwise not consider them worth mentioning alongside the objective facts.  Mormon missionaries always ask you to pray and ask God if the Book of Mormon is true.  From the objective facts above, I knew it was not and would not insult God by asking Him to tell me a fraud was true, so I simply asked Him to tell me the truth about it.  What I received was a vision of Joseph Smith, Jr., as a "treasure hunter" who found that men's hearts were the greatest treasure of all and so invented the book and the religion to con men out of their devotion.  Rather than being a great man of peace and God, I heard Him say, "he died with a gun in his hand, a pagan talisman in his pocket, and no god in his heart."  The vision matches the historical evidence of Joseph Smith's life.  Smith and his family are known to have supplemented their farming income by digging for treasure and conning others into believing they could find treasure with seeing stones.  From history we know that he died in a gun battle when the Carthage Jail where he was being held was raided by a mob.  He used a pepper-box pistol in the gunfight and had a Jupiter Talisman on his person when he died.  Of course, when Mormons talk about "testimony" they generally do not mean detailed visions which miraculously match historical evidence to the smallest detail.  They generally mean subjective feelings of peace, happiness, love, and joy that arise from reading the Book of Mormon and praying about it.  I can say I have experienced such things reading the Bible, though I've also experienced "warm fuzzies" reading and watching numerous other thing which aren't divinely inspired truth (feelings do not truth make).  While reading the Book of Mormon, I was continually sickened and frustrated by its deceptions, inaccuracies, and nearly illegible style.  I was supposed to experience positive feelings and divine confirmation that the Book of Mormon was true, but instead, I've received quite the opposite, agreeing with all the other evidence in my possession that the Book of Mormon is false.

Now, if the Book of Mormon really is true, will reading it not show that to me?  However, if it is false, can I not expect the above arguments against it to only be strengthened and affirmed?  Time will tell if the Book of Mormon really is comparable to the Bible.

Magic in Fiction

Say the name, "Harry Potter" in Christian circles and your bound to get mixed reactions.  Some people, such as my sisters, faun over one of their favorite fantasy-series heroes.  Other people will break out the garlic and pepper spray to ward off the influence of a witch-boy.

Magic has never held a soft spot in the hearts of Christians, or any followers of God, and for good reason.  Whatever the magician's story, Christians explain magic's effects in one of two ways: it's either a sham, a trick with no real power (like a magician pulling a rabbit out of his hat)...or it's playing with the dark forces of Satan and his demons.  In either case, it isn't beneficial and can have some seriously destructive side effects.  Following the Biblical commands against magic (Exodus 22:18, Deuteronomy 18:9-14), Christians have always considered the use or attempted use of magic in our world to be unacceptable.  For much of our history, it was considered a crime worthy of death.

Many Christians make no distinction between the practice of magic in the real world and it's practice in fantasy fiction.  While they admit that the magic in fantasy stories is no more real than the elves and other fantastical creatures that inhabit them, they insist that the use of magic in these stories is dangerous, for it could encourage readers to seek out magic in the real world, which is very dangerous.  One book in particular that has been accused of doing this is the Harry Potter series by J.K. Rowling.  In it, young Harry Potter comes to learn that he has been gifted with magical powers from birth and he enrolls in the Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry for a seven year course in learning to harness these powers--and along the way defeats the evil Lord Voldemort.  Since Harry and his friends are said to be studying to become witches and wizards, casting spells, using divination and the like, many Christians are strongly opposed to the series since they believe that reading it will lead directly to children trying to practice real witchcraft on their own.

But just how real is this threat?  How much of a similarity and a risk is there really?  As an avid reader and writer of fantasy, I felt I had to find out.  If I was sinning by writing magic into my fantasy stories, if I was unintentionally leading my readers into the temptation to practice what God has forbidden, then I had to know.

I felt that the only real place to start was by researching witchcraft itself, as it is practiced in the real world.  After all, if fantasy magic and witchcraft are very closely related, then the risk is high that reading about one could lead to practicing the other.  So, I checked out a book that a Christian had written on the results of her research into the witchcraft religion of Wicca.

What I found was at once somewhat alarming.  The book opens with the writer's visit to Salem, Massachusetts to interview self-proclaimed witches and find out what their beliefs are about.  The town which was once a stronghold of Puritan orthodoxy, the place where even the condemned hated witchcraft and denounced and scorned it, is now a place seemingly overrun with openly practicing witches.  Wicca, the author said, is on the rise, and is believed by some to be one of the fastest growing religious groups in America, though it's very hard to pin down since there are no official Wiccan gatherings and many people slip in and out of its grasp without many of their fellow Wiccans even being aware.

Is Harry Potter and the recent surge in magical fantasy stories responsible for this increase in Wiccan numbers?  The quick answer, I found, was no, not directly in any case.  By no stretch is Harry Potter about Wicca.  While Harry's friends may call themselves witches, they bear no resemblance whatsoever to true witches in our world.  Wicca, for one, is a religion.  While many of it's adherents play fast and loose with their theology, its basic beliefs can be roughly summarized as follows:

1. All is one: everything and everyone in the cosmos is interconnected and of equal value.  Wiccan belief is pantheistic (god is the world and vise versa), and many Wiccan's have strong environmental leanings.
2. Humans are divine: Wiccans hold that, since all is one and god is all, that individual humans are gods and goddesses in their own right.  As such, they believe that they possess divine powers.
3. Gods and the goddess: Wiccan belief falls under the banner of neo-Paganism, which revives the worship of ancient pagan gods and goddesses, often significantly modernizing it and lumping the worship of various deities together.  Wicca is polytheistic, but its adherents generally worship two main gods: the Horned-God and the Goddess.  With the rise of modern feminism, goddess-worship has become a particularly big element in Wicca.
4. Personal power is unlimited: Wiccans hold that their own power is not limited by God and that they do not need to pray to Him.  They have their own resources to fall back on.  Wiccan's are generally highly independent, self-reliant, and anti-authoritarian, which explains why their religion's numbers are so difficult to track.
5. "And harm ye none, do what ye will": Wicca does not lay out a firm moral code and there is, in Wicca, no great distinction between right and wrong.  Wiccan's believe that as long as they aren't harming someone (or something--since everything is one), they are free to do whatever they want.
6. The threefold law: most Wiccan's hold to a form of karma, that whatever anyone does, good or bad, it will return to them three times.  For some Wiccan's this fuels a belief in pasivism: for if an enemy nation has done wrong, then surely their karma will catch up with them eventually.  While many Wiccan's would agree that there does come a point when we have to intervene, they do not, by and large, agree on where that point falls.
7. Consciousness can and should be altered through the practice of ritual: one thing that binds all Wiccan's together is their emphasis on ritual and altered states of consciousness in magic rites in order to tap into and utilize the unseen energies of the spiritual realm.  All Wiccan's share a strong sense of and belief in the supernatural, and believe that it can be used, through rites, rituals, magic objects, spells, and meditation to alter the shape of the natural world around them.

This, of course, bears no relation to the magic of Harry Potter.  In Harry Potter, as in many fantasy stories, magic is a property of the user, which only certain people have access to from birth.  It is not the result of them being part of an interconnected pantheistic cosmos where they are divine, nor is it the harnessing of powers in the spiritual realm around them.  Harry simply has an innate ability to make a wand do outrageous things when he's holding it and says the right words.  Harry Potter also has something Wicca lacks: a strong and well-defined concept of good and evil.  While Wicca is indifferent to morality in general, J.K. Rowling's whole series revolves around a classic clash between good and evil.  To top it all off, J.K. Rowling's book employs one of six "hedges" (http://www.christianfantasy.net/sdg1.html) an author can use to prevent a reader from confusing the magic in their stories for magic in the real world: the "hedge" that magic in her stories is totally fantastic.  Every spell is over the top and absurd, such that no one in their right mind could ever believe that such thing could ever be done in the real world.  Thus, there is very little risk that anyone reading Harry Potter will actually turn to Wicca, and interviews with Wiccans have confirmed this.  While some of the Wiccans interviewed by the author of this book (Wicca's Charm by Catherine Sanders) reported reading Harry Potter before moving on to serious books about Wicca, most did not cite such fantasy stories as an influence: they read Harry Potter the same way they read more conservative fantasy stories such as The Chronicles of Narnia or The Lord of the Rings.

However, magic in popular culture does seem to be on the rise, and Harry Potter is certainly a part of this phenomenon.  In the past generation, a cold empiricism laid hold on much of the culture, Christian and otherwise, resulting in a rise in atheism and agnosticism and disbelief in the supernatural in general.  Even many Christians, influenced by this cultural empiricism, refuse to believe in some of the supernatural realities of the Bible such as special creation, miracles, angels, demons, Satan, and even Heaven and Hell.  The current generation--as generations often do--is reacting against this.  The current generation has a rising fascination and belief in the supernatural, and a desire to experience it not only through fantasy fiction but also through real life.  Since many Christian churches are still in the grip of cold empiricism and cast a dubious eye on anything supernatural--whether good or evil--, some seekers feel compelled to look elsewhere for their real-life taste of the spiritual realm.  If they cannot get it from God, they will get it from the devil, and they run straight for neo-Paganism and Wicca (to be clear, I should say that Wicca is not Satanism.  It's practitioners do not consciously serve Satan or interact with demons: they do not even believe that such things exist.  However, in that Wiccans attempt to--and in some cases, actually do--harness spiritual forces that are not of the God of the Bible, and in that all spiritual forces that are not of God are demonic in nature, in this sense Wiccans can be said to be meddling with the demonic realm--though they doubtless do not know it).

What should be our response, as Christians, to this rising need to identify with the supernatural and interact with spiritual forces?  We should not forget that God is the greatest "spiritual force" of them all and that the Bible brims from cover to cover with supernatural events.  While some Christians have taken the perspective that such happenings are suspended indefinitely, the Bible says nothing to that effect.  As Christians, we have access to the supernatural experiences that people of this new generation are seeking.  We should take full advantage of that, rather than trying to deny the spiritual side of Christianity so that we won't appear foolish before the waning tides of atheism.  Rather than condemning the supernatural wherever we meet it, we should promote our own "magic" (if you will)--for it is superior to what Wicca offers.  While what Wicca offers is a demonic deception, in Christ we have the real deal!

This should shape our approach to magic in fiction as well.  Fantasy writers, like myself, should not cease to use magic in their stories.  How we treat the supernatural is important, in fiction as in reality, and never more so than now.  The magic must go on, but it should be used deliberately.  Great care should be taken to "hedge" against the possibility of fantasy magic being mistaken for witchcraft.  Good and evil must always be distinguished, and each side may be allowed their own magic to draw on--for in the real world, it is so.  Great care must be taken in the way the magic and the supernatural is approached in these fantasy stories.  While these stories are pure fantasy, reading them should always inspire the reader to--if anything--draw closer to God and look to Him as the source of spiritual strength rather than turning to any other source.  In this way, magic in fiction can become more than simply "harmless": it can become a force for good.