Alan Jacobs on Richard Dawkins’ suspicion of Harry Potter:

It strains credulity, does it not, that someone of Dawkins’s education and intelligence could believe that there is no difference between allowing children to read fantasy stories or fairy tales and “bringing [them] up to believe in spells and wizards” — or that children who read stories in which frogs turn into princes could thereby be made skeptical of a science that teaches them that such metamorphoses are impossible. This is astonishingly, Gradgrindingly, literal-minded. Children delight in reading about spells and wizards and frog-princesbecause they know such things to be impossible — that’s the fun of it.Good grief.

It’s especially noteworthy that Dawkins has precisely the same suspicions of fantasy and fairy tale that many fundamentalist Christians do. 

Read it all, commence heavy sighs. Note that Dawkins has not actually read Harry Potter.