Fiction.

When I was young (young -- 9 actually, grade 4 -- young) I was into Dungeons and Dragons...series 1 stuff, not the series 3 and 3.5 that the kids are playing these days. Anyway, I remember when my parents got me my stuff D&D stuff, they were nervous because there had been a rash of news coverage about how dangerous it was...that kids would lose themselves in the fantasy. Indeed the concern was that we would lose our ability to determine the difference between the story and the real world. (This belief was largely given steam because of a few events that did happen where some kids in California dropped a little acid, got dressed-up as thieves and paladins and wandered around the sewers attacking each other with sword-like implements.)

Flash-forward to 1997. Harry Potter and the Philospher's Stone is released to much praise becoming a seemingly overnight hit. Subsequent books in the series earn further accolades. But in the last many years we've heard rumours of problems, groups of conservative parents banding together to state that it's dangerous to let kids use their imaginations in this way (??? - go figure on that one). Or the church, the church denounces all things Harry Potter because evil takes too-prominent a position, and because the books proffer fantasy over reality. In fact, Rev. Gabriele Amorth of the Vatican said, "By reading Harry Potter a young child will be drawn into magic and from there it is a simple step to Satanism and the Devil,"

In both of these cases the subjects are put forward as fiction. FICTION. The kids know that it's fiction -- ask them, they know. So why is it that when something so purely *fictional* is put forth as *fact* (or at least half-fact), the world is not up-in-arms?

Stop forcing children to read the bible. Or at the very least tell them it's no more real than Harry Potter.

I'm just terribly dismayed that I'm more surrounded by deeply religious people than I thought I was a few months ago. And more so when I see parents forcing their children into the same religious shackles; your children are too young to decide for themselves, ergo they are not religious, they are simply repeating the actions and thoughts that you're brainwashing them with.