[lbo-talk] Fwd: Rick Warren should be in prison

[John Thornton]

Mr. WD wrote:
> 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

My tongue was planted firmly in cheek when I wrote that. I have never 
expressed any serious desire to further state censorship.
However the state already censors what prisoners can read. Why should 
religious books be different? Why more outrage over Reinhold Niebuhr 
being censured than "Hustler"?
Years ago when I worked at a bookstore packages sent to prisons were 
more often than not rejected because the material was deemed 
objectionable. They were books on Political Justice, Marxism, Socialism, 
True Crime, and even classics.
We all know that people have killed others because the god in their book 
was better than the god in someone else's.
Porn is restricted but I've yet to hear of someone killing another 
because they felt the pussy in their book was better than the pussy in 
another's.
Show me an example of a Porn War that kills millions and maybe I'll 
lighten up on religion.
If you truly believe that were I serious in my jesting that it was "more 
anti-Enlightenment than even the most ignunt strands of fundamentalism." 
then you really are delusional. Certainly it would be an inappropriate 
response but hardly on the level of fundamentalists espousing a 6000 
year old earth, a factual 7 day creation of the universe, and other such 
nonsense. Unless you too are simply being cheeky?
And yes reading the gospels is a complete waste of time for someone 
searching for texts relevant to today. I wish I had the time back that I 
spend reading them. I would have learned more things of relevance today 
watching TeeVee. In a list of important books that are relevant to our 
lives today they rank near the bottom. They are of interest only in the 
same proportion to other mythologies. While one can enjoy them don't 
look to them for guidance as most gospel readers do. If I read the Iliad 
looking for moral guidance to apply to my life in our modern times I 
would be considered daft.
Rick Warren and Harold Kushner are hardly Soren Kierkegaard.

John Thornton