The Doubting of Harry (EOF3)

In this week's TIME Magazine, Lev Grossman asks the question, "Who Dies in Harry Potter?". The answer: God.

"The Doubting Harry. Why we love a world where dragons are real and religion is the fantasy," reads the article's subhead, as printed in the magazine itself. In the text of the article, Grossman points out how different J.K. Rowling's "Harry Potter" series is from C.S. Lewis' "Chronicles of Narnia" or J.R.R. Tolkien's "Lord of the Rings." Both of those can be read as Christian in their basic outlook, while

Harry Potter lives in a world free of any religion or spirituality of any kind. He lives surrounded by ghosts but has no one to pray to, even if he were so inclined, which he isn't. Rowling has more in common with celebrity atheists like Christopher Hitchens than she has with Tolkien and Lewis.

In the Potter books, there is no God, no heaven, no prayer. Says Grossman:

What does Harry have instead of God? Rowling's answer, at once glib and profound, is that Harry's power comes from love. This charming notion represents a cultural sea change. In the new millennium, magic comes not from God or nature or anything grander or more mystical than a mere human emotion. In choosing Rowling as the reigning dreamer of our era, we have chosen a writer who dreams of a secular, bureaucratized, all-too-human sorcery, in which psychology and technology have superseded the sacred.

I think that's pretty close to the truth about the Harry Potter worldview ... with the caveat that Rowling actually takes potshots at bureaucracy. She portrays it as the enemy of love, not its friend, because of its pettifogging blindness to the dangers posed by the dark and evil Lord Voldemort.

Actually, now that I think about it, there's one more caveat. I tend to doubt that Rowling would feel comfortable with calling love a "mere human emotion." When Harry does his heroic feats to thwart Voldemort, the emotions he typically feels are anger, fear, disgust, bafflement ... but not love. He's forced to battle He Who Must Not Be Named before he's gained his full maturity and become aware of the power of love. In fact, it is through being confronted with the challenges from hate that he grows in love.

All that notwithstanding, clearly love as a deep commitment to humanity and life and a radical opposition to powers of death and destruction — not a "mere human emotion" — is what Rowling's Potter series is all about.


Which means that Grossman is basically right. Rowling seems to be saying — all caveats aside — just what Grossman thinks she's saying: we ought to build a world in which love triumphs over death in our hearts and minds ... and do so in the absence of religion.

That seems to me to be a tall order.

Sam Harris' The End of Faith

In my estimation as a religious believer, I see religion's mission as exactly that: to build a world in which love triumphs over death in human hearts and minds. Yet, as I have documented in my previous two installments in this "The End of Faith?" series, this introductory post and The Gandhi-and-Hitler Problem, books are now cropping up right and left challenging that view. The one I am reading right now is Sam Harris' 2004 screed titled The End of Faith.

Harris opposes faith in both its guises, fundamentalist-conservative and moderate-liberal. He thinks religion is constitutionally unable to set aside those parts of Holy Writ that call for us to make war on infidels ... i.e., anyone with a different Holy Book. He despises modern, moderate theists for their "tolerance" of other religions because that toleration, he claims, effectively turns a blind eye to the seeds of hatred in every faith.


In the second of my previous posts in this series, I took Harris to task for failing to distinguish between religion and its various demonic parodies. In trying to lay out what I meant by "demonic parody," I ought to have likened the faith/demonic parody opposition to that between the Force and the Dark Side in "Star Wars." Anakin Skywalker can morph into Darth Vader, as George Lucas showed us in his motion picture double-trilogy, while still mouthing the selfsame idealistic formulas of his youth. No matter what the ideal, there is a level of commitment to it that can turn anyone into a death-dealing tyrant.

Or, as The Skeptic, Michael Shermer, points out in his most recent Scientific American column, "Bad Apples and Bad Barrels: Lessons in Evil from Stanford to Abu Ghraib":

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, who knew a few things about the capacity for evil inside all of our hearts of darkness, explained it trenchantly in The Gulag Archipelago: "If only there were evil people somewhere insidiously committing evil deeds, and it were necessary only to separate them from the rest of us and destroy them. But the line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being. And who is willing to destroy a piece of his own heart?"

I believe that implicitly: the line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being. In fact, it's exactly what my religion tells me is true, with its distinction between angels and humans. Angels (even if they are fallen) don't have a divided-heart problem. The angels in heaven are good through and through. Those in hell are thoroughgoing Darth Vaders.


So I wonder if the overt attempts by Harris and others to dethrone God, aided by the more indirect influence of Rowling et al., would even work. The fact that religion itself has dealt in death, both in the present and historically, could be taken (as Harris takes it) as evidence that faith per se is harmful to life and love. But it could also be taken as I take it: as testament to the depth of the divided-heart problem we all have to confront, with or without religion. Given that religion, when it is pure and not a demonic travesty, is specifically targeted at this very problem, wouldn't we be foolish to give it up?