Tis the season of Harry Potter: It seems like you can't turn around without seeing the kid's scarred, bespectacled face on something. J.K. Rowling's tales of his adventures have enticed both children and adults with their imagination and invention. And Ms. Rowling's own personal journey from poor, single mom to literary sensation is an uplifting tale of its own: almost a modern-day Cinderella.

But just as Cinderella had her Evil Stepmother and Stepsisters, Pottermania has nemeses as well.

In the books, Harry might be facing the evil of He-Who-Must-Not-Be-Named and his minions, but in real life he's got plenty of would-be Voldemorts on his case. A small legion of grey-faced social critics are accusing him of promoting witchcraft, Satanism, Wicca and Paganism - all at the same time, no less. Various conservative talking heads (often with strange and surreal misinformation) are browbeating Pottermania as the Devil's work. From places as obvious as America's Bible Belt, and as odd-seeming as Taiwan, Potter books are being burned by wild-eyed crowds whose frenzied message is clear: read the book - go to Hell.

Now, not all of Harry's critics are of the wild-eyed, frothy variety. There's more sensible critiques of Harry Potter (and his commercialization) to be found amongst literary circles and critics of consumer culture. But when it comes to sheer force of numbers and noise, the coverage of soft-spoken, well-reasoned arguments is tossed to the wayside in favor of the more obnoxious and less intellectual.

Of course, we should have expected this to happen: it's only a matter of time before something that deals with magic gets attacked by The Torah Tornadoes and/or Biblethumpers Incorporated.

But the thing is that these folks are right... sort of. There is a real danger to Harry Potter, just not the same one they're looking at, unless they're being unusually prescient. The danger is not so much to the eternal souls of the books' readers as it is to the social organizations who are trying to keep the books from being read at all.

And, quite frankly, I consider the "danger" to be a good thing, indeed.

I'm quite a fan of Role-Playing Games (RPGs), which are another favorite target of religious social critics. In college, I did an ethnographic interview of fellow RPG enthusiasts for a Communications class. I chose to explore the questions posed by our detractors, in particular - were we RPers unwittingly playing into Satan's hands?

One participant's answer to the question of RPGs being "spiritually dangerous" has always stayed with me. He said that yes, they were.

Why? "Because RPGs teach you to understand systems," he expounded: "And once you understand how systems work, you realize that religion is a massive, f@#$ing joke."

That's a sentiment that I can understand, even if I don't agree with it. Logic and belief are not necessarily one another's opposite number, but an eye for sociology, history and inconsistency tends to make mincemeat out of most forms of organized religion. After a while, you get really tired of having your earnest questions answered with "God works in mysterious ways," and having it left at that.

But in retrospect - and with the weight of a few years between then and now in the bargain - I think that participant missed something. There is a crucial distinction between being "religious" and being "spiritual," and it is very possible to be one without being the other. A person may recognize the existence of a God or Gods, and believe that our actions are reflected in both the realm of the spirit as well as that of the flesh, but yet have no desire to do that dogma thing. The communion between them and their God(s) is just that - private and personal - and no earthly power gets to claim dominion over it.

It doesn't take a genius to see where certain individuals - or groups of them - might have a real problem with that scenario. Imagine a world with no organized forms of religion, where people just relied on their own judgment, instinct and heartstrings when it came to what the Divine expects of them? No priests to tell you that archeological data must have been made by Satan, no mullahs to exhort the use of C4 belts as a means of entering Paradise, no boring, go-nowhere arguments over doctrinal points that could decide the fate of millions. Just people letting the Divine lead them where It will, on a very personal journey.

I've been doing it that way for years, and let me tell you - it's wonderful.

So we have Harry Potter, and kids are reading those books like mad. They're getting into the amazing, magical world that Ms. Rowling's created: rereading the books over and over and waiting with baited breath for the next one to arrive. But while they're waiting for them, there are so many other books out there in the same genre to be read. In fact, publishers are scrambling like mad to get other "Potteresque" materials out there to meet the demand, or at least cash in on Rowling's good fortune.

As a result, these kids will keep reading it, or things like it, for some time to come. Maybe they'll go past Harry Potter after a time in favor of the more "sophisticated" fantasy fare to be had. Maybe they'll just stay in that area of the genre until they're old and gray. But whichever way they go, they're reading, and they're exercising their brains.

It's highly likely that extended exercises in critical and creative reading, thinking and play will form habits that last a lifetime. By extension, it's quite likely that many kids who enjoy such pastimes won't be filling houses of worship as adults. Somewhere in there, the bugaboo of creative, independent thought rears its head and roars - and trust me, it won't shut up for anything once it starts to yell.

That's the real "danger" that Harry Potter represents to these people, regardless of what they might think: they might lose a significant amount of future followers to the "evils" of independent thought and spirituality over dogma. For organizations that exist only because people are willing to believe in their version of "the truth," that's a near-as-damn death sentence. And they know it.

Will Harry Potter be the straw that breaks the back of dogma and denomination and rings in a new era of spirituality? Probably not: most people still need iron walls to bounce around in, and I don't see the current atmosphere of "overlord culture" going from 100 to a full, dead stop over one, single book. But such things can only help to hasten the wonderful day when our current "reality" is relegated to the past, much as notions of a flat earth or spontaneous generation.

Me, I can hardly wait.