Fire and Knowledge

I used to do this in middle school for fun, but it’s pretty funny that an adult is recommending it.

Encyclopedias are a vital part of many school libraries…. [They] represent the philosophies of present day humanists. This is obvious by the bold display of pictures that are used to illustrate paintings, art, and sculpture…. This makes it important that the materials we place before our children are free from … that which would inflame passion. [We] are not battling a plot that captivates minds but are looking for erroneous information, sensual pictures, and unchaste details…. One of the areas that needs correction is immodesty due to nakedness and posture. This can be corrected by drawing clothes on the figures or blotting out entire pictures with a magic marker. This needs to be done with care or the magic marker can be erased from the glossy paper used in printing encyclopedias. You can overcome this by taking a razor blade and lightly scraping the surface until it loses its glaze…. [Regarding evolution,] cutting out the sections is practical if the portions removed are not thick enough to cause damage to the spine of the book as it is opened and closed in normal use. When the sections needing correction are too thick, paste the pages together being careful not to smear portions of the book not needed for correction.

—Ray Martin, “Reviewing and Correcting Encyclopedias” in Christian School Builder (1983) as quoted in Michael Shermer, Why People Believe Weird Things (1997), pp. 138-9.

If a crime doesn’t hurt anyone, should it really be a crime?

It is time we realized crimes without victims are like debts without creditors.

—Sam Harris, The End of Faith: Religion, Terror, and the Future of Reason (W. W. Norton, 2004), p. 171.

Everywhere, every day, local life is being discomforted, disrupted, endangered, or destroyed by powerful people who live, or who are privileged to think they live, beyond the bad effects of their bad work.

A powerful class of itinerant professional vandals is now pillaging the country and laying it waste. Their vandalism is not called by that name because of its enormous profitability (to some) and the grandeur of its scale. If one wrecks a private home, that is vandalism, but if, to build a nuclear power plant, one destroys good farmland, disrupts a local community, and jeopardizes lives, home, and properties within an area of several thousand square mile, that is industrial progress.

—Wendell Berry, “Higher Education and Home Defense” in Home Economics (1986), p. 50.

[This is a controversial claim, but his logic seems sound. What do you think? I’m inclined to agree.]

It is time for us to admit that not all cultures are at the same stage of moral development. This is a radically impolitic thing to say, of course, but it seems as objectively true as saying that not all societies have equal material resources. We might even conceive of our moral differences in just these terms: not all societies have the same degree of moral wealth. Many things contribute to such an endowment. Political and economic stability, literacy, a modicum of social equality—where such things are lacking, people tend to find many compelling reasons to treat one another rather badly.

Our recent history offers much evidence of our own developments on these fronts, and a corresponding change in our morality. A visit to New York in the summer of 1863 would have found the streets ruled by roving gangs of thugs; blacks, where not owned outright by white slaveholders, were regularly lynched and burned. Is there any doubt that many New Yorkers of the nineteenth century were barbarians by our present standards?

To say of another culture that it lags a hundred and fifty years behind our own in social development is a terrible criticism indeed, given how far we’ve come in that time. Now imagine the benighted Americans of 1863 coming to possess chemical, biological, and nuclear weapons. This is more or less the situation we confront in much of the development world.

—Sam Harris, The End of Faith: Religion, Terror, and the Future of Reason (W. W. Norton, 2004), pp. 143-4.

I was looking through the magazine rack at the hospital and noticed a number of Watchtower pamphlets. For those who don’t know, Watchtower is the Jehovah’s Witnesses propaganda magazine. I became frustrated that they would put their literature there, preying upon sick and scared people at the hospital.

It also reminded me of my time in high school when a friend and I would put gospel tracts in books (especially in the Occult section) at Books-a-Million. That was lame, but not this lame. I wasn’t preying upon the sick and scared, wooing them into a religion where it’s a sin to have blood transfusions.

Anyway, there are no more Watchtower magazines at that hospital.

The doctrine of transubstantiation was formally established in 1215 at the Fourth Lateran Council (the same one that sanctioned the use of torture by inquisitors and prohibited Jews from owning land or embarking on civil or military careers)…. After this incredible dogma had been established, by mere reiteration, to the satisfaction of everyone, Christians began to worry that these living wafers might be subjected to all manner of mistreatment, and even physical torture, at the ends of heretics of Jews. (One might wonder why eating the body of Jesus would be any less of a torment to him.) Could there be any doubt that the Jews would seek to harm the Son of God again, knowing that his body was now readily accessible in the form of defenseless crackers? Historical accounts suggest that as many as three thousand Jews were murdered in response to a single allegation of this imaginary crime.

—Sam Harris, The End of Faith: Religion, Terror, and the Future of Reason (W. W. Norton, 2004), pp. 99-100.

I’ve written a short post on charity: water on the DG Blog.

It is morally as bad not to care whether a thing is true or not, so long as it makes you feel good, as it is not to care how you got your money as long as you have got it.

—Edwin Way Teale, as quoted in Carl Sagan, The Demon-Haunted World (Ballantine Books: 1995), p. 12.