[Imladris]

Just a thought that occured to me as I read this very thought provoking thread:

So, like the 'magic' in her universe, the 'morality' is morally neutral too? The reader decides, based on their own subjective criteria whether a character is 'good' or 'evil' - Rowling will not offer an objective moral standard by which actions are to be judged. So, a reder is free to see either Harry or Voldemort as the 'hero' depending on their individual moral value system? Who says 'loyalty & bravery' are 'moral' or 'virtuous'? Certainly they cannot be said to be 'moral & virtuous' in & of themselves - that would depend on exactly what the character is being loyal to, wouldn't it? And as to 'bravery' - that isn't necessarily morally good - a Death camp guard who risked his life to force children into a gas oven would have been seen by his superiors as behaving 'bravely', even heroically.

So, again, there has to be some objective moral yardstick by which even loyalty & bravery are judged as good or evil.

I disagree. I believe that she her standard, her yardstick or whatever, is the Law of Nature (or the Law of Right and Wrong). To define what I mean:

This law was called the Law of Nature because people thought that everyone knew it by nature and did not need to be taught it. They did not mean, of course, that you might not find an odd individual here and there who did not know it...but taking the race as a whole, they thought that the human idea of decent behaviour was obvious to everyone." -- Lewis

In LOTR you know from the beginning who is on the good guy side and who is on the bad guy side(exceptions: Saruman and Wormtongue, but Tolkien makes them suspect from the start). In HP people seem to arbitrarily switch sides. Also Children have easily influenced minds, I know I did, still do. HP makes magic seem so easy and discribes it is such a details that the incantations and other tools of it can be easily repeated and learned. People, especially Christians, fear that children will find all this easy to learn magic in HP cool and want to learn it, only to be led into witchcraft. And it is well documented in the Bible that God finds witchcraft among the most deadly abominations. The "magic" in LOTR is not like this. It is hardly used and when it is, it's secreats are not revealed. And the power of those like Gandalf seem more like the power of the angels themselves not magicians.

I've read the HP books many times, but didn't really catch any "switching of sides" but I digress...

Almost everyone who posts here compares the magic of LotR to the magic of HP without realizing that we shouldn't be comparing them at all. LotR and HP are totally different in the type of books they are. LotR is Mythical, HP is not. They are two different kind of stories, but instead Christians hold LotR (and Lewis) as a standard without considering that that is not the only type of fantasy there is. I think that scares them and hence, the cries for banning etc.

Again, these are just half formed thoughts that came to me as I tried to work out all the opinions and views of this thread in my poor tired brain, and I apologize if I missed the point entirely.