Harry Potter from a Christian's POV

 1. Good writing. The writing was good, interesting, and naturally flowing. Enough said on that vein. 2.Black magic and demons weren't involved in any way. 3. Harry was a real kid. While you were sympathetic for Harry and cheering him all the way through, he did have his moments of impatience, confusion, and loud-mouthness which made him neither a perfect hero nor a brat, but an actual person. In fact, all of the kids were like that, neither fully wicked or fully good. - Hermione is bossy but loyal - Ron is brash, but cares very deeply for others - Draco is haughty but initially friendly to Harry - Neville is clumsy and timid but courageous when the time calls for it 4. Non-villainous adults! (IS THAT EVEN LEGAL NOWADAYS?!?!) In nearly all teen/middle grade fiction, the adults are: A. Dumb. B. Evil (from the scale of 'you're destroying the ecosystem!' to 'you took money out of my highly expensive college account to pay for my younger sibling's c...

To put it simply, 'good magic' and 'dark arts' sort of work like the Force, where a Jedi throws an opponent and a Sith strangles an opponent. Good magic is magic that doesn't typically cause physical harm, while the dark arts is magic specifically used to harm others, like in the case of the magic Voldemort tries to use to kill Harry.  It's the difference between the torturing curse that Voldemort uses on his victims and the puking pastilles the trickster twins, Fred and George, market for skipping classes at school. But sometimes the lines get a little blurry, especially in the last book. Though to be fair, the situation sin the last book were mostly 'terrorists are trying to kill our children!/We will be tortured and killed!' situations, not a 'the bad guys are going to take the unicorns away!' situation, so I think that gives the heroes the right to defend their children/families/homes by any means possible (then there's the whole...

 So Harry can produce magic without even thinking about it. Why does he need a wand, let alone go to school? Okay, so I'll try to keep this brief: Since Harry can't control his magic, he can't control the amounts in which he uses it. So he goes to Hogwarts to learn to control it (it should be noted that in the space of time between the incident at the zoo and Harry actually going to Hogwarts for the first time, he has not been in fear of his life, so he hasn't used magic in that time.) Hogwarts is a safe(ish) environment, so students aren't usually  prompted to do magic without meaning to, and classes are taught on how to make produce particular magic, or 'spells'. We don't get full details of how those first classes go (as it was a kid's book, and kids really don't want to read about deep philosophy and such when they're in the middle of an adventure), but we do hear how the children are taught in later books: - Professor Remus L...

So how did these characters get these powers? Well, to tell the truth, I think it's like the X-men. Basically, what I mean, is that somehow magic was introduced into the world a while ago (pre-medieval ages) and stuck around, influencing the genes of humans and typically staying within the bloodlines of the humans who it affected, much like in the X-men franchise, where Mystique + Azazel = Nightcrawler, Phoenix + Cyclops = Rachel (telepath/telekentic) or X-man (same). To quote Harry Potter Wiki: "Due to the dominance of the magic gene, children born to at least one magical parent will usually be magical themselves." Then there are these quotes from the books: "I'm a what? " "A wizard, o' course... With a mum an' dad like yours, what else would yeh be?" - HP and the Philosopher's Stone "What about you, Neville?" said Ron "Well, my gran brought me up and she's a witch," said Neville, "bu...