Wednesday November 3, 2010
Michael O’Brien: Reading Potter, Twilight, Pullman Series – “We become what we eat”
Says, “we are being led deeper and deeper into a comfortableness with darkness”
By Steve Jalsevac
OTTAWA, Ontario, November 3, 2010 (LifeSiteNews.com) – Renowned Canadian novelist and artist Michael O’Brien addressed the International Pro-life Conference in Ottawa, Canada last Saturday. During the question and answer session following his talk O’Brien was asked to comment on today’s problematic literature for children and youth, such as Harry Potter, the Twilight series and others. The question and O’Brien’s response are published below.
QUESTION: I was hoping that you were going to mention today your thoughts on some of the reading materials for children. I’m thinking about Harry Potter and some of the other books. Because a lot of times we think that these books are harmless. Desensitization is the word that comes to mind for me. So could you mention something about the evil in a lot of the material that children are reading these days.
MICHAEL O’BRIEN: Well, I’ve just written a book on it so I won’t try and tackle the whole thing but let me say in essence, part of the struggle for our time, I would say a major warfront, is through culture – film, literature, the Harry Potter phenomenon and the Twilight phenomenon and His Dark Materials series by Pullman and countless other new pagan, fantasy material which is flooding the consciousness of the younger generation.
This is a major front in the war because first of all it’s corrupting the symbols of good and evil or blurring them. It’s a big subject. I can’t say much today.
Our desensitization, we are being led deeper and deeper into a comfortableness with darkness, with the power of evil and a lot of this new fantasy is an attempt to convert symbols and the activities of evil into a good and it brings to my mind the passage in the New Testament that warns about the end times in those days. It’s Paul, Thessalonians.
He says men will call evil good and good evil. So you have in the Potter series a kind of soft, very powerful corruption of symbology. In Twilight you have a different approach to it – a little more blatant, not so religious in its use of symbols. In Philip Pullman you have a full frontal attack against Christianity openly stated.
But these are only the surface of a much larger problem in the culture.
We generally tend to think of faith as a certain compartment of life, culture is another compartment. Almost all of us have been habituated into taking a dose of poison with our cultural diet, Thinking, well, we’re baptized we pray, we’re good people, we wouldn’t ever do those things that we are entertained by. But we become what we eat. That’s a major area where we are being deceived.