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If religious texts or some forms of literature are deemed harmful, should they be locked away, burned or have offending passages edited or deleted?

Geoffrey51 8 June 11
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23 comments

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13

None of the above.
All religious texts should be ridiculed and derided for the trash they are.
As should any other "literary" crap.
BUT, never, EVER edited, censored or banned.
NEVER.

KKGator Level 9 June 11, 2018

Book Banning is Bad.

@jlynn37 100% agreed. Banning and burning books is just plain wrong.

Agreed.

Only when you need the heat to avoid freezing to death.

6

Book burning is not the answer to anything.

6

I believe in freedom...no censorship. If the literature is crap hopefully people will stop reading it and relegate it to obscurity.

Well said Nick?

6

I disagree with a lot of those books, but I will defend, to the death, the right to publish/sell it.

I would make Bibles taxable (if the jurisdiction taxes other books), and would love to classify them as fiction, though.

Ozman Level 7 June 11, 2018

Excellent idea. As fiction the religious tales across all the religions are great stories and, to my mind, designed as such. Cautionary tales, adventure stories, love poetry. The problem comes when they are placed within a didactic canon.

5

Hahah! No definitely not. Burning /destroying books and censorship is what happens under authoritarian rules, particularly fascism.

Livia Level 6 June 11, 2018
5

Truth is the best antidote to the lie.

I used to think that too, until the recent political administration, and now I find it hard to believe. ?

Sunshine is the best disinfectant!

@ThinkKate : It is the responsibility of every citizen to educate themselves and be able to discern a lie. You are smart enough to see the god delusion. And you are smart enough to see the political delusion.

@dare2dream True. Perhaps my frustration 'lies' in that so many of my contemporaries are 'blinded by the hype'. Maybe Al Yankovich needs to do a song like that.

4

"Deemed harmful"....by whom? Slippery slope here!

Nice one, Anne. That is the crux of the question. Who and for what agenda?

4

I believe that's censorship, you really don't want to go down that road.

4

You cannot control people's thoughts or beliefs. You can only hope to persuade them. It's a tortuous and thankless process, and mostly fails.

However ... higher levels of education and knowledge seem to be incrementally improving the thought processes of each successive generation. Or at least I thought so until the Trumpocalypse came along. Now I think that, at a minimum, we've had a huge setback.

That's a point isn't it. In Australia we don't really see the day to day implications of the Trump era. We just see an inarticulate buffoon bumbling from one crisis to another with no real concept that the ship is sinking! Let's hope there is a viable antidote for the situation soon.

@Geoffrey51 that is pretty much what we see here

Amazing how the short-fingered vulgarian keeps coming up, no matter the topic. Its like, all roads lead to the swamp.

@Matias Knowledge <> wisdom but wisdom is pretty limited as a possibility if all you have is ignorance. And there's no ignorance worse than religious ignorance. The church has had two millennia to conclusively demonstrate that it's the path out of ignorance.

4

What? Edit the ineffable, inerrant, unchanging word? Perish the thought. Unacceptable. Not a thing to be tolerated by any even partially breathing follower of the word. Never. Not on your tintype, baby. Listen, they edit facts as they are presented to preserve the word and you expect to go in with a red pencil and mutimulate one single, tiny jot or tittle? You walk into a roomful of armed woo mongers with a notion like that and you'll find yourself shot, skewered, and skinned before you finish saying, "Hi. I'm an editor and I'm here to...."

Let's not give them the slightest reason to dig in. They're suffering substantial attrition now. Let it continue unabated.

So true.... It would be fun to give it a go though.

3

Because of its history, burning books is something I could never do. No matter how much I hate the book, or how much I despise the content... burning a book, to me, means I've become like those who have stood against ideas.

3

No. Free speech is fundamental. All else follows.

JacarC Level 8 June 12, 2018
3

No. If censorship is started, it could be thinkers like us who get censored.

3

No. Alas, no. You will never eradicate an idea, no matter how foolish the concept, by force. First of all, it would be impossible to ferret out every copy. Given the easy reproducibility of text, both print and digital, a single copy could proliferate like a weed. And the attempt at supression would be like killing the enemy's favorite son, creating a martyr that can used held up as a rallying cry to generations.

3

No more than any other work of fiction needs to be "censored".
Nobody learns anything from pretending the past didn't happen.
It's always good to try and work stuff out,
It's never good to simply make shit up.
Denying history, in any way, to me, is the equivalent of "making shit up".

3

This is exactly what happened in early Christianity. In fact it was rampant. Couple that with all the accidental interpolations and mistranslations and what you have is a convoluted mess. Ultimately Historical Jesus won out and cosmic Jesus was surpressed so much so that only some of Pauls letters survive and even they have been meddled with. All evidence for or against Jesus outside the cannon is miniscule to non-existent, which is quite strange for someone who was supposedly so famous and influential..

3

If you ban, burn, censor, etc., all you are doing is making that product MORE desirable because you have piqued people's curiosity. Let them come to their own conclusions.

2

No book or texts should be destroyed. Interpretation as to which books and texts being harmful is wide open. Farenheit 451 anyone?

2

Sure, book burning has always been on the right side of history.

Also Jews, what's up with them amirite?

2

Don't think i'd be advocating the book burning route, too many precedents ...

1

Nah, too much effort for something not worth it...

Agree with you there Kate?

1

Harmful how? As determined by who? I don't like censorship in any form. If anything, they might have value as examples of another culture. You could draw a parallel to the way pornography was handled in the 1950's. Just because we don't like it doesn't mean no one else should have access.

0

I’d discourage any reprinting, but hope future archaeologists would appreciate finding some in order to brag how far humanity'd come.. Like Egyption hieroglyphs or Greed gods ~

Varn Level 8 June 11, 2018
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