Book burning has a checkered legacy, to put it mildly.
To put it bluntly, book burning is anti-intellectual, anti-democratic and harmful to the free exchange of ideas.
But a North Carolina pastor has other ideas. To him, the King James version of the Bible is the only proper Bible. It's God's true Word, he claims, never mind the fact that it was translated by some very fallible human beings.
Other Bibles, the preacher says, can and should be burned. They are (get this!) "Satan's books." Even Billy Graham's books, the church says, are tainted and should be burned.
We not members of this North Carolina congregation, of course, but AT strongly disagrees. We stand for openness, debate, and the honest search for truth, even spiritual truth.
Our advice: Leave the other Bibles and books alone. Let these books stand or fall in the court of public discussion and debate.
The Raw Story has details.
5 comments:
KJV-Only-ism has been around for decades; it only seems newsworthy to you because you have such minimal contact with the Christian world. It is like seeing a headline that says, "Some Advocate a Living Constitution."
Fear not; KJV-Only-ists are really quite few in number and larger Christendom regards most of them as somewhat loony. Perhaps well-intentioned, but somewhat loony.
A related story this week:
Group of U.S. conservatives rewrite the Bible: Conservapedia wants a Good Book with less liberal bias, more hell
Hope they are few in number, too.
That was extraordinarily offensive and high-handed of you, M o' W. There are many Christians who are liberal and many liberals who are Christians as well as those who follow other belief systems. How tedious, boring and utterly predictable for a right-winger to assume that only right-wingers can be Christians. It's probably because you have such minimal contact with real liberals and only cast us in the mold that exists only in the fever-dreams of paranoia so prevalent on your end of the political spectrum.
You forget, read comments from them all over the web, not only can REAL Christians only be conservative, the only REAL Americans out there are conservative. All those other people? They aren't real Amercans because conservatives actually own America by divine right and if yhey disagree with with you, citizenship or not, you're not a real American.
They are beginning a process of learning internalizing a feeling of complete ownership over our society and dehumanizing the percetions of those that disagree with them.
They'd get behind ANYONE right now who can make them believe that, "I WILL make you STRONG again!"
it's all a big conspiracy where they are ALWAYS the victim.
Furthermore, they seem to have an attitude, mindset, and memory as if the world only began last November. Nothing before exists. Gone with the wind.
If you are the type to advocate the burning of "competing" versions of The Bible, then you might as well put the torch to the library. How exciting to live in a world were there is only one book to read. That sounds like hell to me.
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