{"id":25868,"date":"2010-12-08T23:22:19","date_gmt":"2010-12-08T23:22:19","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/scienceblogs.com\/gregladen\/2010\/12\/08\/christians-fear-werewolves-and\/"},"modified":"2010-12-08T23:22:19","modified_gmt":"2010-12-08T23:22:19","slug":"christians-fear-werewolves-and","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/gregladen.com\/blog\/2010\/12\/08\/christians-fear-werewolves-and\/","title":{"rendered":"Christians fear werewolves and wizardry."},"content":{"rendered":"

Christians fear werewolves and wizardry. Oh, and vampires. A Canadian Salvation Army center throws away Harry Potter and Twilight toys that are donated to them, rather than passing them out to kids for Christmas or even giving them to a different charity with less hypocritical standards. “The Salvation Army is based on Christian principles, so these things are not in line with those” says a Salvation Army officer, though guns and other toys of violence are, if the local ministry likes. People who work in the local ministry where this was discovered throw the Potter and Twilight toys away, but the official policy of the Salvation Army is to give the toys to a different charity unless, instead, they throw them away. Yes, yes, it is in fact rather contradictory and confusing. And or someone is lying. Just read the original story<\/a>.
\n
\nThis all makes sense to me, and it is kinda cool seeing Christians getting back to the old ways. When I was a kid, we were told stories about poltergeists and ghosts, not as made up scary Halloween yarns, but as facts, as part of our cultural training. When the book The Exorcist<\/a>\"\" came out everyone in my household read it, and we discussed, very seriously, whether or not it was real. We decided it was in part because we had at least one exorcist in the family so it wasn’t that far fetched.<\/p>\n

I don’t think we believed in Vampires or Werewolves and all that, but we definitely believed in ghosts, and the Harry Potter stories have ghosts.<\/p>\n

What I don’t get is why the kids can’t have the toys. I understand that these Christians believe in werewolves and vampires (otherwise, why fear them?) but why would they not want their children to have them? They do let them have guns, right? Why not let them have a werewolf toy AND a gun, so they can use the gun to practice shooting the werewolf!<\/p>\n

Perhaps this is just a phase in a nostalgic revival. Yeah, that’s probably it. Today, express belief in vampires and wizards but avoid the icons. Next year, let the kids play with the dolls and other trappings. In a few years, start looking for the actual witches and maybe burn a few. The children would have had a lot of target practice by then. Onward Christian Soldiers!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Christians fear werewolves and wizardry. Oh, and vampires. A Canadian Salvation Army center throws away Harry Potter and Twilight toys that are donated to them, rather than passing them out to kids for Christmas or even giving them to a different charity with less hypocritical standards. “The Salvation Army is based on Christian principles, so … Continue reading Christians fear werewolves and wizardry.<\/span> →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"1","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[],"tags":[2486],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p5fhV1-6Je","jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/gregladen.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/25868"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/gregladen.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/gregladen.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gregladen.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gregladen.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=25868"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/gregladen.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/25868\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/gregladen.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=25868"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gregladen.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=25868"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gregladen.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=25868"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}