[Edit: Comments have been disabled on this post since (for some reason) it was targeted by spam bots. If you’d like to comment, email me directly. Thanks. -T]

I‘ve thought about this at length but it hasn’t been something I’ve yet elaborated on here. It recently came up on my radar again, invoking the Baader-Meinhof effect as it came at me from multiple different sources. This barrage lodged the topic in my head and so I’ve just been ruminating on it endlessly. I have to get this out, first, before I can move on.

The topic is book burning. For some reason, there still exists an unusually large group of people who think book burning is a good idea. The moral guardians of a culture—Christians, in America—take it upon themselves to limit others’ exposure to works which, by their rubric, are evil. This is censorship in a broad sense, but it continues to manifest itself in the form of burning printed works.

This sort of action might have been effective in the middle ages when knowledge was protected, there was little learning, few could read, and anything that was written down was highly guarded—not to mention there wasn’t very must of it to begin with. Certainly it was easy to protect villages, or entire countries, from being deceived simply by brute force. Unfortunately it turns out we no longer live in the middle ages.

Depending on who you ask, it’s either a blessing and a curse that we have access to more information than we ever had before—and not just access to the information, but the ability to comprehend and understand it. Everyone’s educated to a certain extent and despite the pessimistic prognosis of the public school system, we have quite a strong literacy rate. Despite—or perhaps because of—these factors, attempts at censorship continue.

As far as the suppression of books go, banning them is one thing, but burning books is just bizarre. The only way it makes the slightest bit of sense would be as a symbolic act. I wish it were presented as a symbolic act. But from what I’ve seen regarding book burnings from the church I grew up in, as well as others around the area, it’s clear that they intend the book burning “ceremony” to be a serious, important exercise in ridding the world of evil media.

The problem with this is that it’s completely ineffectual. For every evil book someone burns, there are millions more that haven’t been burned—and it’s not even like one can go and find them stockpiled somewhere and burn them there. These things are all stored electronically. Many of the more obscure or self-published texts are released through print on demand services. The book doesn’t even physically exist until someone orders a copy—then one gets printed up and sent out. Furthermore, unless you steal the material you’re burning (I wouldn’t put it past some people), someone had to pay for the stuff, so the author is benefiting regardless. And this author isn’t just some random person—it’s someone who’s spreading evil. Essentially, by buying a book to burn, you are funding the author to produce more work which would also, presumably, need to be burned. It makes the problem worse.

But besides the futility of numbers and huge wastes of time (shouldn’t Christians be using that time to win people for Christ? It’s not like they’re actually preventing anyone from obtaining the evil material in the first place), there is yet another problem to deal with: the sheer number of voices.

Here’s where Christianity—or any religion professing to be the truth—should stand out. This goes hand in hand with what I wrote about in my comparison with libraries and religion. I think it’s a vital point, though, so I’m going to reiterate once more. There is absolutely no way to win the war of good and evil by silencing the evil. Forget it; it’s just not going to work. You cannot control what anyone else sees, hears or reads. And unless you want them to be able to control what you can see, hear, or read, you shouldn’t think this is a good idea, either. We’re all adults and we can make decisions for ourselves—at least that’s the theory.

So I’ll say it again: if you have the truth, you don’t need to censor everyone else. Even so, book burning is such a monumentally stupid way of going about this that it boggles the mind. It reminds me of Hamlet: “methinks the lady doth protest too much.” Burning books is so ineffectual that it’s at best a waste of time, and at the very least makes you look one thousand years too late. If you have the truth, live the truth, and those searching will find.

-Ted