Why is it "Evil"?

 

I think that's a bit reaching as an interpretation.

 

I, on the other hand, consider it the completely natural interpretation. The afterlife is the obvious place for souls to go after being separated from the body, and in the afterlife they area clearly forever gone. There's no resurrecting the dead, Dumbledore was quite clear about that. I didn't even consider the idea that Dementors destroy souls until I saw it years later in fanfiction.

 

But as we know souls can be called back from the afterlife. That's what the resurrection stone does. So they are certainly not "forever gone".

 

Speaking to the dead and actually resurrecting them is not the same.

 

Never said it was. But if you can speak to the souls then one would be hard pressed to still claim that they are forever gone.

 

they are since the resurrection stone is gone, a fairytale for children

 

Firstly, the resurrection stone is pretty rare and extraordinary magic. Its existence, even if believed true, would not affect the way people speak about the general effects Dementor's kiss.

Secondly, we don't really know what the resurrection stone does -- if it brings back the actual souls, of if it's some kind of elaborate magical construct.

 

It's taking more and more assumptions to maintain that souls are not destroyed by dementors. I think the simpler explanation - they are destroyed - is the correct one in this case.

 

is it not simpler to believe dementors remove the soul without death then they kill the soul, and wouldn't Harry and Sirius souls be destroyed because of what happened at the lake at the end of PoA

 

It's clear that no matter what the dementor does to souls after sucking them out, it did not succeed in PoA - no soul was sucked out.

 

You're going to have to provide argumentation for this. I don't see it as simpler at all. For the resurrection stone to have an impact on the discussion, you have to assume:

1. The resurrection stone actually resurrects souls.

2. The resurrection stone is widely believed to exist.

3. Wizards take the resurrection stone into account when they refer to general magical rules surrounding death.

Only with these assumptions can you claim that wizards saying "the soul is lost" cannot refer to it being in the afterlife.

I, on the other hand, simply refer to the much simpler general rule widely accepted by wizards: death is an ultimate, impassable barrier. Once something crosses it, it cannot come back. A soul in the afterlife is completely gone, never to interact with the world again.

 

As someone who is a practising Hindu, I like to believe that the soul is immortal and what the dementors do is simply remove it from its vessel unless canon states explicitly that the kiss destroys it. It is open to interpretation as to what happens to the soul after the kiss

 

Even when we assume that the soul survives, judging by what Snape in P.o.A. says about how horrible the kissing act is, it's still a sign of how rotten and evil a system is where such a punishment is used. And I maintain that if it was simply death by an exotic means, then Remus and co. would say that, and not talk about the soul being gone forever.

 

I think a Dementor's kiss is equivalent to capital punishment in the Wizarding world. Casting unforgivables gets you a life sentence in Azkaban and not death.
So the magical's reaction to it is probably what ours is to executions

 

Oh, it's not death. The Dementor's Kiss is very much not the same thing as the Killing Curse; they have visibly different effects. A person is more than their soul; they are their soul and their body. The Dementor's Kiss removes the soul from the body, but the person isn't dead yet, not until the body dies too.

 

According to Hagrid, it's worse than death, whatever that means.

 

I agree, the dementor's kiss is not meant as death penalty as we know it.
Of course from what I got out of the HP series was that in many way the magical world believed that death was the ultimate horror. You have the method for which Voldemort tried to stay alive and the wizard worlds belief that killing someone was the worst crime you could commit.

 

I suppose one pet peeve of mine is whenever in a fanfic someone claims that the Killing Curse is painless. Granted, I don't see it said all that much, but it still irritates me.

 

Its as close to Capital Punishment that the Wizarding World gets though.