Disco Inferno

The latest from Landover Baptist, one of the more with-it Christian churches in our modern world-
http://www.landoverbaptist.org/news1002/bookburning.html


Now, this would be funny if it weren't actually true. Not, perhaps, to the extent that these guys claim to do it, but I'm afraid this is the case. Not to be ragging on Christians (okay, maybe a little...) but that Bible verse is in reality used to justify the destruction of books of a 'pagan' or 'ungodly' nature. How do I know this? Because I once sat in a church and heard the priest use this exact verse to justify burning books, Tarot cards and things of a "heathen" (lacking a better term) origin in his backyard. I was shocked- burn books? What insanity was this? I was waiting for him to say, "Ha! Gotcha!" Unfortunately that moment never came- and I never returned to that church again, nor to any other. In a lot of ways, it was the nail in the coffin for me. Again, not that I have any particular beef with the church as a whole, as I doubt this book-burning goes really that extensively, but it was still a shock.
To me, destroying a book is a greater blasphemy than anything that book could contain. The written word is a way of preserving knowledge, or at least information and stories, from one generation to the next. I can crack a book and find the recorded wisdom of people gone by, people who crumbled to dust centuries before I ever drew breath. Is every written word necessarily true or accurate? Of course not, but why, when a book exists that has incorrect information, take a step backwards by not reading it? Do we discount Hippocrates and the humours in the body because medical science has rendered them obsolete? Well, while Hippocrates may not be exactly modern medicine, I think it's still useful to retain his writings as an example of scientific method, if nothing else. He based his conclusions on what he observed, and from this we can extrapolate why he drew the conclusions he did, and in so doing hopefully advance our own understanding a bit more. So again, because the church deems a book 'bad', it's to be consigned to oblivion? Well, the upside is, ideas have a funny way of continuing to pop up, despite the best efforts of those who would eradicate them. Free thought is one of our greatest gifts- don't throw it away for anyone, nor would a true thinker dare ask you to do so.
Well, thanks for reading my latest rant, stay well everyone!