Perhaps I'm alone on this because I tend to value human lives over...well...pretty much everything...but THIS action by a bunch of Muslims in Pakistan bothers me to no end.
I don't care WHO does it, but when it comes right down to it, the Koran is a book. While I think all books are important and no book should ever be burned...
It is not okay to kill someone over a book--or several someones...especially when the book is widely printed.
As far as I'm concerned, it's a shame that someone was stupid enough to burn a book even partially...but to kill them in retribution? That's thousands of times worse.
I cannot imagine one situation where I'd be okay with someone being murdered in retaliation for burning a piece of literature.
Yes, it's terrible to burn books. I, more than anyone, can talk about this because, as I'm packing, I realized that I probably have more books than anything else I have combined. (Seven FULL boxes of books and counting.) HOWEVER...when you are reacting to burning of books (especially books with no substantive value like religious texts) in this manner? Unacceptable.
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I think burning books is fine, were i get mad is when knowledge is destroyed....“Plagiarism is overrated. When Newton and Leibniz invented calculus, there was a war in academia over which country stole the other country’s ideas. They were debating over the ownership of a universal truth. You can’t own an idea. You can’t steal an idea. To steal something means to take it so that the first owner doesn’t have it any more. All ideas do is replicate like viruses, sweeping from host to host.
ReplyDeleteThe virus is an equal-opportunity human infector. All mankind is of one author, and is one volume; when one man dies, one chapter is not torn out of the book, but translated into a better language, and every chapter must be so translated into a better language to you, a better language to me, it’s all a massive mixing and remixing of ideas. When you worry about who gets “credit,” or fame, glory, money, or respect, you fall into the illusion of what is important and forget why you are doing this.”
-Mac Davis....burning a book is okay, but stopping that remixing of ideas is stealing knowledge from the next, and every other generation after that.
It's funny to talk about the Calculus war between Newton and Leibniz because they were fighting over two completely different explanations over the same thing.
ReplyDeleteWhen you look at their approaches, you find that the only real commonality that they had in the way they went about trying to prove calculus is that they both sort of faked their way through it. =P
But, anyhoo, you are right. It is the idea that is more important than the pages themselves, but I feel that burning a book is symbolic of a sort of willful ignorance that should not be tolerated at any cost.
HOWEVER, this is completely different. The reason people are up in arms over burning a book is not because it has great ideas in it or wonderful concepts but because it is their woo woo book.
No knowledge in that book is worth killing another person. No *holy aura* that book emits was so awesome that the desecration of those few pages would be worth the lives of even ONE person.