Oh please. I am no fan of religious superstition, but you ought to know better. For one thing, the principle behind this policy (that the BOP can't regulate all religious literature, so it should just create a list of acceptable publications and ban everything else) could just as easily be used to deprive prisoners of political books we'd all want them to have access to. What is the chance any BOP committee chosen to select 100 approved books on political theory would even select anything by Marx, let alone Lenin or Trotsky or Malcolm X?
Of course, there's the question of whether prisons should be restricting prisoner access to any publications at all. Even if you only give prison administrators the ability to restrict racist hate literature and/or hard core porn, they're _always_ going to go overboard. Here in NC, prisoners aren't allowed to receive sexually explicit material, but this is being used by some prison administrators to restrict prisoners from receiving totally innocuous mags like Out, The Advocate and O: The Oprah Magazine.
And even if you think there are some legitimate reasons to restrict prisoner access to some particularly loathsome material, I think it would be disingenuous to argue that The Purpose Driven Life is anywhere near as harmful as The Turner Diaries.
Finally, religious thinking still has the potential to be interesting in spite of its religious aspects. Is Kierkegaard just a bunch of superstitious drivel? Are you really wasting your time when you read the gospels or The Confessions? Zizek writes about religious ideas all the time.
I don't like religion either, but some of these knee-jerk, anti-religious outbursts are more anti-Enlightenment than even the most ignunt strands of fundamentalism. -WD
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