I am in no mood to treat this author's work except than as the crap it is. I am not getting him any more readers, so if you want, track it down yourself.
If an author presents a character as admirable, then he approves of her views. Caitlin is consistently presented as admirable - stylish, attractive, brave (she is an Auror), diplomatic and wise. What she says is not challenged.
You got the history wrong. The period the author is speaking about is the high Middle Ages (a period in which, historically, witch hunts did not happen - they were a by-product of that great love of all "humanists" and enemies of Christianity, the Renaissance, began about 1400 and reached their climax about 1600).
Contrary to your curious belief, the centrality of bloody sacrifice and the identification of bloody sacrifice with both the sacrificer and the supreme god are a feature of most religions I know. To the extent that I know for a fact, and have shown in my publication Gods of the West I: Indiges, that at some point in the lost history of Celtic Christianity, some sort of identification between the chief gods of Celtic religion and the Three Persons of the Trinity must have taken place, based largely on the identification of Lleu/Lug with sacrifice and of sacrifice with the Second Person. So much for the strangeness of Christian religious ideas. And no matter how much you twist it, "weird Middle Eastern crucifixion cult" for the religion of Galileo, Beethoven and Shakespeare is an insult, and a racist insult to boot.
I cannot imagine what drives you to search for every possible red herring to bring to the argument. Would you have done the same if, instead of insulting Christians and Christianity, this creep had spoken of, say, smelly N---ers or treacherous slit-eyed Chinks? This is the level we are on.
Re: The beliefs and actions of (a) character(s) are not automatically those of the author.
If an author presents a character as admirable, then he approves of her views. Caitlin is consistently presented as admirable - stylish, attractive, brave (she is an Auror), diplomatic and wise. What she says is not challenged.
You got the history wrong. The period the author is speaking about is the high Middle Ages (a period in which, historically, witch hunts did not happen - they were a by-product of that great love of all "humanists" and enemies of Christianity, the Renaissance, began about 1400 and reached their climax about 1600).
Contrary to your curious belief, the centrality of bloody sacrifice and the identification of bloody sacrifice with both the sacrificer and the supreme god are a feature of most religions I know. To the extent that I know for a fact, and have shown in my publication Gods of the West I: Indiges, that at some point in the lost history of Celtic Christianity, some sort of identification between the chief gods of Celtic religion and the Three Persons of the Trinity must have taken place, based largely on the identification of Lleu/Lug with sacrifice and of sacrifice with the Second Person. So much for the strangeness of Christian religious ideas. And no matter how much you twist it, "weird Middle Eastern crucifixion cult" for the religion of Galileo, Beethoven and Shakespeare is an insult, and a racist insult to boot.
I cannot imagine what drives you to search for every possible red herring to bring to the argument. Would you have done the same if, instead of insulting Christians and Christianity, this creep had spoken of, say, smelly N---ers or treacherous slit-eyed Chinks? This is the level we are on.