Alright, so if you haven't read any Harry Potter books (or seen any of its movies), you'll learn what you need to know here anyway. In short: Harry Potter is a child of two wizards who died when he was a babie, and he's attending to a Wizard school (named Hogwart or something) where magic drama is happening as in any other typical wizard-high-school movie/book.
Here are some similarities between Harry Potter and the typical religious holy script:
- Both texts involves spectacular events and abilities. Harry Potter can fly with his broom and make things fly with his magic, and the characters in the scripts conducts spectacular miracles comparable with the things the characters in Harry Potter do.
- In both texts, physics as we know it is defied. No need to point out the [in my opinion absurd] differences between our experience of how the world really behaves, and how it work in Harry Potter. Similar law-defying physics appears to happen in the typical script too. None of the "miracles" in neither text can be demonstrated with an experiment/demonstration other than with illusions (magic tricks), CGI (computer-generated imagery), misunderstanding or with actual expected physical explanations (= non-magic / non-miracles .. e.g. taking antibiotics to get rid of a bacteria).
- Scripts often make two poles; believers and non-believers (in turn divided to deniers and agnostics). The believers are typically righteous and the agnostics/non-believers are typically "lost" (and will go to hell for that). In the world of Harry Potter a similar kind of dichotomy prevails: there are mugglers (non-magicians) and Wizards (magicians). The wizards are esoteric, and the mugglers don't have a clue about that esoteric stuff.
- There are the evil guys, and the good guys.
- Both contains subjects with super human powers, with no equals observed (concretely) in real life.
- You can curse or praise both texts (while holding them) as much as you want without experiencing any unexpected physical events caused by that. Your expectations and beliefs surrounding the text in question can however make you feel (thus experience) things - caused by psychology well known and explained in a rational and scientific manner.
Some last words. The list can be made much longer, but that's not the point of this post. The point is that I think they are comparable in many ways. You sure can compare many unrelated things, but as literary texts they match quite well. The similarities between Harry Potter and a book in theoretical physics or clinical psychology is however not as digestible as this comparison is. Further, the dissimilarities between fiction and a factual books are similar to the dissimilarities between holy scripts and factual books. As I said, this is not a matter of opinion but the result of callous analyses that I've done - if the results where strictly against any opinions of mine I'd have openly shared those conclusion.
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