Wednesday, June 11, 2008

International House of Prayer meets Farenheit 451

No, I am not making this up. There really is a church of the IHOP. And they're really burning books.

Y'know, I always wonder about this book-burning thing. It seems to lead to people-burning. As Austin Cline says, "People don’t burn books simply because they disagree with the message of the books, they burn books because the message of the books is a threat — a serious threat, in fact, not something remote and [hypothetical]." He goes on:
Burning books and burning people are connected because both stem from a desire to eliminate ideas that are a threat to the some group or ideology which is in power. Heinrich Heine recognized that such a connection could exist and perceived that once people could be persuaded to burn books, then at least some of them could be persuaded to take the further step of burning those responsible for the creation of those books.
Book burning keeps happening--but none of it has succeeded in doing in ideas yet. The people who do this are FOOLS--it's pointless, dangerous, and has nothing to do with "humility"--but everything to do with mob violence.

"Where they have burned books, they will end in burning human beings." ("Dort, wo man Bücher verbrennt, verbrennt man am Ende auch Menschen.")
—Heinrich Heine, from his play Almansor (1821)

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