When will the libricide end?! Something wreaks of bad old happenings:
Orthodox Jews set fire to hundreds of copies of the New Testament in the latest act of violence against Christian missionaries in the Holy Land.
Or Yehuda Deputy Mayor Uzi Aharon said missionaries recently entered a neighborhood in the predominantly religious town of 34,000 in central Israel, distributing hundreds of New Testaments and missionary material.
After receiving complaints, Aharon said, he got into a loudspeaker car last Thursday and drove through the neighborhood, urging people to turn over the material to Jewish religious students who went door to door to collect it.
“The books were dumped into a pile and set afire in a lot near a synagogue,” he said. [Read more.]
When the Nazis burned books, it was an atrocity. Aren’t we better than that now?
I understand PZ Myer’s point regarding the burning of the Koran. No books are holy and no one should really be offended by the burning of these books. I’m a little on the fence here because the protest that has been planned as a September 11th memorial. Pastor Terry Jones readily confused this act expressing this freedom to protest with the building of the Mosque/Community Center (with an undetermined range of distance it can exist from Ground Zero). While I don’t think the Koran is holy, as I don’t with any book, I also loathe the idea of burning books a la Fahrenheit 451 style. There is also the argument that we largely live in a post paper society. Does book burning hold any real meaning anymore anyway? Or is it about the symbolism?
Whether it’s Jews burning the Bible or Christians burning the Koran, I fail to see how it’s a good way to protest. How about reading these books and criticizing them? That works, too.
