I love a good parody.

Boy do I love a good parody.

I also like good theology, even if I disagree with it.

World O'Crap has reported
on Hairy Polarity and the Sinister Sorcery Satire, a sort of big budget Chick Tract about the "very real dangers of sorcery and witchcraft."

This is not good satire. It is not good theology. And at $2.50 a copy, it's not even a good value.

The material basically writes itself. This is a 32-page piece of propaganda designed to teach our children that magic and sorcery is real, and that it's dangerous and evil and you should not read or learn anything even tangentially related to it. World O'Crap has already taken it to task more than enough, and I wouldn't bother restating the obvious (except to point out that if you do manage to convince children of the premise, you've blown your chance to convince them of the conclusion), except that there's this one little thing that really speaks to why the theology is bad.

Page 5. This is where it happens. The password, letting you into the Evil Inner Sanctum is "knowledge". That's right, folks. Knowledge is evil. Now, our hero does go on to reframe this in a sound byte that, if you don't think about it too much, sounds convincing:

The search for knowledge over wisdom was a big mistake to begin with.

That should sound familiar, because it's a paraphrase of a pretty well-known adage. The problem is that the emphasis is all wrong. While they attribute the line to Proverbs, it's actually an old Japanese proverb. Their point: knowledge (actually knowing stuff) is bad. "Wisdom" (that is, what the people in power tell you) is good. Knowledge without wisdom isn't great, no. Wisdom and knowledge are supposed to work together. But that's not what they want. They want "wisdom" to the exclusion of knowledge. Knowledge without wisdom is useless. Wisdom without knowledge is opinion.

Even though I place it in the spot of prominence, that page wasn't really the one that triggered my attention. What got me was the middle frame of page 3:

Then again, mom says just reading about witchcraft is how she got into, too -- and I shouldn't fill my mind with this stuff.

Same problem as before, and it runs deeper if it's less overt. When I read this line, I knew what we were in for. Knowledge is power, I think most folks would agree. But it's an evil power for the folks who wrote this. What can you say about a belief system that tells you that even the simple knowledge of something will pervert and corrupt your soul? What you don't know can't hurt you, I suppose.

This just doesn't make any sense. If something is dangerous, shouldn't you try to learn as much as possible about it, in order to steer well clear? Let's extend this philosophy. Take navigational hazards off of maps, because the knowledge will, siren-like, attract navigators to their watery grave. Get rid of poison warnings, because they'll only tempt you. And for the love of God, don't tell people about safe sex. Oh, right.

Once again, the message is: ignore reality. Knowledge is bad, it'll only lead you astray.

Like I said before, if you accept that God created the world (because if you don't, there's no problem), then it's important that we pay some attention to it. That's what we're for. Getting rid of knowledge is a form of denying the world. And that's not good theology. At the very least, it's not good Christianity.

You can know about things you don't approve of. It doesn't turn you evil to know about witchcraft (insofar as it exists). Knowing how a condom works isn't going to compell you to have sex. The fact that nice Mr. Johnson next door seems exceptionally friendly with nice Mr. Smith isn't going to fill you with an insatiable thirst for the manlove.

I don't happen to think these things are particularly evil, but, despite my knowing a thing or two about them, I feel absolutely no desire to engage in a full two-thirds of them. So, if I, who think that none of these things are particularly evil (maybe a little evil, but so many things are. Like, "wearing a garment woven of two cloths" evil) don't feel any desire in that direction, how in the world would someone who actually was convinced these were "eternal brimstone" evil, be swayed?

And since a lot of folks would question my Christianity, I'll lend a little force to it by finding more or less the same sentiment by someone whose faith is harder to dispute than my own:

Evil into the mind of God or Man
May come and go, so unapproved, and leave
No spot or blame behind; which gives me hope
That what in sleep thou didst abhor to dream
Waking thou never wilt consent to do.