Posted on 09/18/2008 9:37:00 AM PDT by Southside_Chicago_Republican
Let's fill some trucks with books, drive them downtown and burn them in front of the Chicago Public Library. Let's drive other trucks to the regional libraries and burn them, too . . . I mean the books, not the libraries, though libraries are the source of the problem. If it weren't for the libraries, it would be hard for innocent young people to be corrupted by the filth pouring out of the country's printers.
Instead of burning books or libraries, perhaps we ought to start smashing printing presses. They have served as tools of sin and the devil since Herr Gutenberg invented them.
When the radical evangelicals take over the White House, lists of books that one shouldn't read or in fact are forbidden to read will spread around the country like wildfire, you should excuse the expression. Unless a much tighter control is imposed on distribution of books, the morals of the country will continue to deteriorate, which will in turn weaken us in the long war on terror.
I say that as a member of and indeed a priest in a denomination that originated lists of forbidden books. I don't know whether we ever piled them up in front of cathedrals and set them on fire, but I can't imagine that a tradition that has always valued dramatic rites could miss the possibilities of an auto da fe against books. If you'd burn humans at the stake, why not books?
The so-called "fundamentalists" came into existence to destroy one book in particular -- Charles Darwin's On the Origin of Species. As one of their 19th century leaders remarked, "If we don't resist Darwin, we lose the Bible."
Oh ye of little faith! Why must ye think that the power of the biblical stories depends on their literal, word-for-word inerrancy? Why can't you see that those men and women who study it so closely actually enhance its wonder? Why instead must ye wander through the desert searching for the pillar of salt that was Lot's wife? Why can't ye understand that ye continue the battle between science and religion with thy concern about routing evolution from the classrooms? Don't ye realize that ye reinforce the paradigm, so loved by thy friends in the national media, of the battle between science and religion? When the results finally leak out about the European Organization for Nuclear Research experiments in Switzerland, just watch the stories confronting religious ideas about creation with "scientific" knowledge.
The religious truth is that the universe was created from nothing, indeed in a huge explosion that is still going on and preceding according to complex mathematical formulae around which we are still trying to wrap our brains? Isn't that wonderful enough for you? Why do you have to postulate a God who set up evidence that there were dinosaurs to test thy faith?
The real argument against listing books for possible burning (or removing from a library) is that, as we Catholics learned, it doesn't work. Tell humans that they can't read something and of course they will find ways of reading it -- as the Stalinists learned from Aleksander Solzhenitsyn. You could burn all the copies of Harry Potter, and young people would still read these classic stories of the triumph of good over evil. Get rid of Catcher in the Rye from your parish library and kids will pass around mimeographed copies of it. Banish The Canterbury Tales and you will enhance Geoffrey Chaucer's readership.
Do I really think the Supreme Court would permit such violation of human rights, should an evangelical become president? The Supreme Court, as Mr. Dooley said, follows the election returns. Haven't you noticed?
I thought that the Church maintained a library of such works (wasn't there one in "The Name of The Rose"?).
It was the muslims who burned down the library at Alexandria.
Who is in favor of burning books? Why doesn’t the man talk about reality? Or is this reality for him?
I guess this priest is FOR banning the Bible under the mistaken belief that it will get more people to read it.
It doesn't work in Saudi Arabia and it didn't work in the USSR.
I’m for banning the use of the Saudi book that calls non-muslims the offspring of pigs and monkeys. That is inappropriate for American schools. If it is to be used as a learning tool, it should used to point out modern bigotry among the muslim world.
Not all books, just Greeley's.
Andy who? He’s so ‘60’s.
Father Greeley is not a Jesuit or a member of any religious order. He is a secular priest, answerable to the Cardinal Archbishop, not a religious, or member of a religious order, answerable to an Abbot or Superior.
I believe you’re right about Alexandria.
I don’t know about the Church maintaining a library of forbidden books, but I do know that the Church did preserve a lot of culture that would have otherwise been lost during the Dark Ages.
Greeley should have done a little more research here, and they he would have easily found out the answer to his question without having to “imagine” it.
My mistake. I seem to remember seeing his name with an S.J. after it, but it must have been someone else.
I had no idea to toady that this guy is a Catholic Priest. How does the POPE allow this hateful man to exist?
In the hard-copy edition of the Sun-Times, published yesterday, there was a photo of some church in 2000 burning Harry Potter books, among others, in the churchyard. I know that stuff happens, but it is rare and isolated.
Kind of reminds me years ago when I was doing an internship in D.C. There was supposed to be a joint Klan-Nazi rally someplace out there. One of my associates was very disturbed about it, but I told her about the big Nazi rally I witnessed in St. Louis — four Nazis in the back of a flatbed truck. I told her not to worry. Turns out I was more than accurate — the joint Klan-Nazi rally was one guy with a sandwich board who happened to be a Nazi and a Klan member.
“Next chapter for radical right: Burn books (BARF!)”
This is the crap we get from the left while Obama tries to burn down WGN in Chicago. Apparently they don’t think actually knowing what they’re talking about is necessary.
Yep. Just another example of their duplicity.
Thank you Fr. Greeley. One question though, do we burn the books before or after we round up the Jews? You seem to have much better sources than me.
Lets burn newspapers!
I find it difficult to believe the good father is this ignorant of the history of his own Church. Burning of impious books in public was a common Catholic practice. A most famous one was carried out by Savonarola, the Bonfire of the Vanities, many of which were books.
Unfortunately for Savonarola, not too much later they had another bonfire, with him as the guest of honor in the flames.
Or that a serious newspaper published it !
I am not a Catholic, but I understand Andrew Greeley to be a priest in good standing. As to the Sun-Times being a serious paper — well, it has its good points and its bad points. Lately, bad is winning.
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