Hi All,
The first time I read the Narnia series was as a child of about 8 or so, I had no idea it was supposed to be an allegory about Christ. To me it was just an entertaining fantasy tale not terribly different from the Hobbit which I read at about the same time.
Funny isn't it? For some reason this quaint tale of fawns and lions and the eventual triumph of good over evil, is supposed to be a potentially dangerous and corrupting influence, so dangerous that our children must not be permitted to read it.
On the other hand, it was fine and laudable when as part of our 10th grade English Curriculum I was assigned the book "Native Son". I remember gleefully reading a couple of extracts from it to my mother, in which the protagonist, Bigger, first smothers his employers daughter with a pillow and then attempts to destroy the body, and follows this up by graphically bashing his girlfriends brains out with a brick. My parents were horrified and couldn't believe that I had been assigned such a book by a school, the administration maintained it was "a great American novel" and that I needed to be exposed to these things in order to properly mold my character. Thus followed several years of reading novels either existentialist or nihilist in their philosophy, and always teaching the same message of the purposelessness and despair of existance, that morals were, after all, relative and finally meaningless, and counseling one to either rage against the system, or simply commit suicide.
What a wonderful society we are building. Naked Lunch and The Plague get two thumbs up, but Narnia must be legally removed from the curricula as potentially harmful to young minds. Looks like we approve of always winter and never Christmas here too. Watch out kids, Maugrim and his secret police are coming to make sure you don't hear about Aslan.
- SEAGOON
