…and this is a 
Making libraries safe havens for the ignorant once again
Category: Godlessness • Kooks
Posted on: November 23, 2007 3:50 PM, by PZ Myers
A Canadian school board has decided to remove Philip Pullman's books from its schools' shelves because people complained that the author is an atheist. This is a remarkable objection, obviously. I mean, we don't see school boards screaming to remove Chuck Colson's books from the shelves because the author is a convicted felon, which seems to me to be a much more serious indicator of moral turpitude than atheism, nor do we see a call to eject books by Ann Coulter because she is incredibly stupid, and is therefore a poor role model for students. It's just atheism that spurs this objection.
I think we ought to run with it. The school board didn't go far enough. Let's purge school libraries of all books by atheists.
Wikipedia has a nice partial list to start with. Let's throw all these authors out.
- Douglas Adams (1952-2001): British radio and television writer, author of The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy.
- Isaac Asimov (1920-1992): Russian-born American author of science fiction and popular science books.
- Dave Barry (1947-): American humor columnist and author of Big Trouble, among others.
- Ambrose Bierce (1842-1914?): American writer, author of The Devil's Dictionary.
- Marshall Brain (1961-) Author of WhyWontGodHealAmputees.com and GodIsImaginary.com
- Sir Arthur C. Clarke (1917--): British scientist and science-fiction author.
- Vardis Fisher (1895-1968): American writer, scholar. Author of atheistic Testament of Man series.
- Nadine Gordimer (1923--): South African writer and political activist. Her writing has long dealt with moral and racial issues, particularly apartheid in South Africa. She won the Nobel Prize in literature in 1991.
- Jan Guillou (1944--): Swedish author and Journalist.
- Sam Harris (1967--): American author, researcher in neuroscience, author of The End of Faith and Letter to a Christian Nation.
- Harry Harrison (1925--): American science fiction author, anthologist and artist whose short story "The Streets of Ashkelon" took as its hero an atheist who tries to prevent a Christian missionary from indoctrinating a tribe of irreligious but ingenuous alien beings.
- Christopher Hitchens (1949--): Author, journalist and essayist.
- Michel Houellebecq (1958--): French novelist.
- S. T. Joshi (1958--): American editor and literary critic.
- Ludovic Kennedy (1919--): British journalist, author, and campaigner for voluntary euthanasia.
- Pär Lagerkvist (1891-1974): Swedish author who was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1951. He used religious motifs and figures from the Christian tradition without following the doctrines of the church.
- Rutka Laskier (1929-1943): Polish Jew who was killed at Auschwitz concentration camp at the age of 14. Because of her diary, on display at Israel's Holocaust museum, she has been dubbed the "Polish Anne Frank."
- Stanislaw Lem (1921-2006): Polish science fiction novelist and essayist.
- Giacomo Leopardi (1798-1837): Italian poet, linguist, essayist and philosopher. Leopardi is legendary as an out-and-out nihilist.
- Primo Levi (1919-1987): Italian novelist and chemist, survivor of Auschwitz concentration camp.
- Georg Christoph Lichtenberg (1742 - 1799): German scientist, satirist, philosopher and anglophile. Known as one of Europe's best authors of aphorisms. Satirized religion using aphorisms like "I thank the Lord a thousand times for having made me become an atheist."
- Pierre Loti (1850-1923): French novelist and travel writer.
- Joseph McCabe (1867-1955): English writer, anti-religion campaigner.
- China Miéville (1972--): British Science Fiction author.
- David Mills (author) (1959--): Author who argues in his book Atheist Universe that science and religion cannot be successfully reconciled.
- Camille Paglia (1947--): American post-feminist literary and cultural critic.
- Harold Pinter (1930--): British playwright, screenwriter, poet, actor, director, author, and political activist, best known for his plays The Birthday Party (1957), The Caretaker (1959), The Homecoming (1964), and Betrayal (1978). Winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2005.
- Terry Pratchett (1948--): English Fantasy author known for his satirical Discworld series.
- Philip Pullman (1946--): CBE, British author of His Dark Materials fantasy trilogy for young adults, which have atheism as a major theme.
- Ayn Rand (1905-1982): Russian-born American author and founder of Objectivism.
- Ron Reagan (1958--): American magazine journalist, board member of the politically activist Creative Coalition, son of former U. S. President Ronald Reagan.
- Salman Rushdie (1947--): Indian-born British essayist and author of fiction.
- José Saramago (1922--): Portuguese writer, playwright and journalist. He was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1998.
- Dan Savage (1964--): Author and sex advice columnist. Despite his atheism, Savage considers himself Catholic "in a cultural sense."
- George Bernard Shaw (1856-1950): Irish playwright, only person to have been awarded both a Nobel Prize (Nobel Prize in Literature in 1925) and an Oscar (Academy Award for Best Adapted Screenplay in 1939 for Pygmalion).
- Percy Bysshe Shelley (1792-1822): British Romantic poet, contemporary and associate of John Keats and Lord Byron, and author of The Necessity of Atheism.
- Warren Allen Smith (1921--): Author of Who's Who in Hell.
- Kurt Vonnegut (1922-2007): American author, writer of Cat's Cradle, among other books. Vonnegut said "I am an atheist (or at best a Unitarian who winds up in churches quite a lot)."
- Ibn Warraq (1946--): Best-selling author and secularist scholar of Islam currently living in the United States. He is a Muslim apostate and an outspoken critic of Islam who has written extensively on what he views as the oppressive nature of Islam.
- Gao Xingjian (1940--): Chinese émigré novelist, dramatist, critic, translator, stage director and painter. Winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2000.
This is going to greatly thin out the science fiction section of the library, which some of those stick-up-their-butt board members will probably consider just dandy…and those degenerate romantic poets, good riddance. Not on this particular list, though, are all those godless scientists—we're going to lose huge chunks of the science section, and particularly hard hit will be the contemporary scientists. Goodbye, Qs. And then philosophy — good grief, the devastation wrought on the philosophy block will be horrifying, and it will also spill over into theology.
Targeting the intellectual, literate segment of the culture, the kinds of people who write and read books, is simply guaranteed to hit large numbers of atheists, and it's a powerful strategy for this school board to take, especially if they want to reduce spending on books. There is the problem that it's often not easy to detect which books had an atheist author — it's not the kind of datum that's specified in the card catalog. Maybe we should also insist that publishers stamp some distinguishing mark on books by atheist authors to simplify their identification, like, say, a scarlet A on their spines.
We don't have to stop there. How about if we also mark all of the books by gay authors, too? I'm sure many school boards would like to set those on fire. Maybe we could insist that all such books have pink covers, or perhaps a pink triangle placed somewhere prominently on the cover.
Why not have the author's religious sect indicated, too? Many American protestants hate Catholics, so some Catholic symbol on the cover would help discriminating readers. I don't see why I should have to read any books by an Episcopalian ever again, myself.
Then there are other indicators of an author's unsuitability. Do they smoke? Do they eat meat? Are they Republican or Democrat? Do they have peanut allergies? Are they cat people, or dog people? Have they ever watched The Rocky Horror Picture Show, or The Passion of the Christ? Do they believe in UFOs? What are their positions on abortion and gun control? Tastes great, or less filling?
I think with only a little work we can make libraries completely safe for our children, and also cheap to maintain. We'll rarely need to make any new book purchases, and staff can be cut drastically, since all we'd need is one part-time person to come along occasionally and dust the single shelf of short, unchallenging mental pablum…all of which will be so boring that no children will ever be at risk of desiring to read any of it.
Canada leads the way. I'm sure glad we can still find an occasional non-American to do something asinine and let us know that pissant prudery is a global phenomenon.
Politics
Comments
This will just make more room for the books by the good christian authors like Mein Kampf by Adolf Hitler. After all, being a christian means your a moral person, right? (dripping with heavy sarcasm)
Posted by: starfall | November 23, 2007 4:03 PM
From the article:
I'll bet that sounds just wonderful to many.
Posted by: Brownian, OM | November 23, 2007 4:03 PM
After reading the book, the committee will complete an evaluation form that examines a "wide variety of criteria" including grammar, plausibility, language, plot, etc.
What? Are they hoping to find a few stray split infinitives so they can justify keeping the book out on non-religious grounds? This sounds very suspect to me.
Posted by: Olaf Davis | November 23, 2007 4:05 PM
Get rid of library computers, Bill Gates is an infidel too.
Posted by: Danley | November 23, 2007 4:06 PM
Yet another reason why the Ontario govt. should stop funding the Catholic school system.
Posted by: Jason Spaceman | November 23, 2007 4:08 PM
I read recently that Bill Gates was a christian. I read so much stuff I can't remember where I read it, but no, thank goodness for indices. It was in George Walden's God Won't Save America and it is not the sort of thing he would get wrong. Where is your info from?
Posted by: Peter Ashby | November 23, 2007 4:13 PM
Abso-frickin-lutely.
To clarify, however, I think the complaint isn't so much that Pullman is an atheist, but that the His Dark Materials trilogy is explicitly anti-religious (one of the protagonists sets out to kill God, after all), and explicitly anti-Catholic (at least, anti-alternative-world-Catholic).
With that said, I heard someone on the radio this morning make that argument, and say that since schools wouldn't allow books that promote racism or homophobia or anti-semitism, it shouldn't allow these books either. And I thought, "Yeah, books that argue for atheism and against religion are exactly like books that promote hate. No wonder atheism is so reviled."
Posted by: Tulse | November 23, 2007 4:20 PM
When and where are the book burnings? Really to do this right, they have to actually burn the books in a public display. Refreshments are optional but a drunken mob definitely makes for a more authentic spectacle.
They should toss in the Harry Potter books too. AFAIK, Harry wasn't Catholic, and the books do deal with magic.
Posted by: raven | November 23, 2007 4:21 PM
Wow, the twits really crawled out of the woodwork to add their two cents on the forum, didn't they?
From half the responses on the page, I'm tempted to wonder whether Catholics can read at all.
In case there are any Catholics here who might be wringing their hands at all the Catholic bashing, I've got some advice:
Don't wanna be criticised for being a bunch of bloodthirsty, savage, murderers who squelched nearly every attempt at free thought when they weren't massacring whole continents? Then don't have the fucking history of the Catholic Church!
Assfaces.
Posted by: Brownian, OM | November 23, 2007 4:26 PM
My favorite poet Robert Frost has to go,he wrote.
"I turned to speak to God, About the world's despair; But to make bad matters worse, I found God wasn't there."
Posted by: Jonboy | November 23, 2007 4:28 PM
It's a Catholic school. Surely if you sign up for a Catholic school you get what you pay for -- the censorship of this particular book seems like the least of your problems when trying to eke an education out of a religious institution.
Posted by: BMurray | November 23, 2007 4:44 PM
... plausibility, huh?
Excellent. I'd like to ask this committee to reconsider the presence in their carefully vetted collection of the bible, the qur'an, and the vedas, should any of those be present.
I mean, hell, priorities, people. If we're gonna purge the collection of works that lack 'plausibility', let's start with the worst offenders.
... makes ya wonder, really, where the hell the cold readers were on these things, whether, y'know, the writers thought at least to run it by someone, say, hey, y'know... you see anything wrong with this?
I'm picturing that, now: God brings the bible to a writer's meeting, for feedback:
CRITIC 1: Okay... now let's get this straight. Then Cain has kids, right?
GOD: Yep.
CRITIC 1: About where that wife comes from...
GOD: Oh. Right... Ummm... Well... hadn't so much thought about that.
CRITIC 1: We'll leave it with you.
CRITIC 2: Now this burning bush... this some kinda metaphor?
GOD: Not especially.
CRITIC 2: See, I was totally getting this VD vibe.
GOD: I'll keep that in mind.
CRITIC 2: How 'bout just a disembodied voice?
CRITIC 1: No, I like the whole concreteness of the bush at least... it's absurd, but it's there... a voice, y'know... not enough oomph.
CRITIC 2: How 'bout a wilting pillar?
CRITIC 1: Not funny.
CRITIC 3: Anyway, let's talk plot. I'm trying to put the whole thing together, here. Protagonist creates world, gets pissed off with how that turns out, drowns most of this creation for 'sinning'... I'm not clear on this... he made them, right?
GOD: Right.
CRITIC 3: Then he made them to sin, right?
GOD: Right.
CRITIC 3: Then why didn't he drown himself?
CRITIC 1: I was just reading that as some sorta passive-aggressive, self-hating anti-hero thing.
CRITIC 2: Okay, I can go with that... and now that you mention it, he sort of does punish himself later... or sort of... has a son... who's also himself... umm... what's that about?
GOD: It's a mystery.
CRITIC 1: No, kid, a mystery is something you leave out of explicit exposition, keeps people guessing, or let's them imagine what's behind that. That, my friend, is pretty much a contradiction. You can become your own stepson, by various unpleasant contrivances, if you live in the Ozarks and your mother is willing... but your own son, not so much.
CRITIC 2: But then he does have himself crucified.
CRITIC 1: And brought back from the dead.
CRITIC 2: Who does that?
GOD: Who does what?
CRITIC 2: Who brings him back from the dead?
GOD: He does.
CRITIC 2: But... he's dead.
CRITIC 1: We'll leave it with you. Turning to this new testament thing, we've some issues with continuity/consistency between the accounts... Or is this supposed some sorta Rashomon post-modern multiple points of view thing? I'm getting slightly different takes, here on what actually happened. Anyway, I marked up your copy...
CRITIC 2: Oh, and about the title.
GOD: Yeah?
CRITIC 1: 'The good book'? What is that?
GOD: Well...
CRITIC 1: It's been done, man. There's already 'A heartbreaking work of staggering genius'. You can't do 'The good book' It's not funny anymore.
GOD: Actually, it wasn't supposed to be funny.
(Crickets chirp)
CRITICS TOGETHER, AFTER SUFFICIENT PAUSE: Oh.
CRITIC 1: Listen, umm, guy?
GOD: Yeah?
CRITIC 1: So this whole thing... this... umm... this isn't supposed to be a satire.
GOD: Umm... no.
CRITIC 1: Oh.
CRITIC 2: That... umm... changes things.
CRITIC 3: Tell ya what... maybe you could leave it with us a bit longer... Maybe we can get back to you next week?
CRITIC 2: Two weeks.
CRITIC 1: Three.
CRITIC 2: Three it is. Oh, and in the meantime?
GOD: Yeah?
CRITIC 2: You do have a day job, right?
GOD: Yeah.
CRITIC 2: Good.
Posted by: AJ Milne | November 23, 2007 4:45 PM
To be fair, it was a Canadian Catholic School board that pulled his books. Now for the life of me I can't understand why we still have "catholic" seperate schools and schoolboards in Canada.
Posted by: Jefe | November 23, 2007 4:47 PM
"Pissant prudery." I love it.
The best part is that this kind of censorship will do nothing to deter the determined. Lolita was banned from our school library for pissantly prudish reasons. Upon finding out, I bought my own copy and have been lending it to various classmates. I should start my own mini-library, composed solely of the most offensive books.
Posted by: j | November 23, 2007 4:50 PM
Shouldn't this list include Samuel Clemens (Mark Twain)? I do not know if he was a full on atheist but many of his writings were critical of religions and Christianity in particular.
-DU-
Posted by: David Utidjian | November 23, 2007 4:54 PM
You have no idea how pissed I am about this. As an atheist married to a Catholic, and a Green candidate in the last election (the only party to advocate ending the funding for the separate school board), I am furious.
What really chaps my ass is that atheists are the last remaining faith-group (and I know we're not that, but it's a useful shorthand to use) that they can discriminate against.
Fortunately, since the province gives them money, we get to tell them what to do. I think I'll write some letters.
Posted by: Brett | November 23, 2007 4:54 PM
Wave goodbye to everything by Feynman, for starters.
Posted by: Blake Stacey | November 23, 2007 5:02 PM
Plausibility? Since when is a fiction/science-fiction book reviewed for plausibility??? This is insane!
Plus, it's a library, where you have to go and pick-up the book. Maybe they don't have enough space on their shelves.
So their problem is that an anti-God book is sitting in the library of a Catholic school. Well, looking through my university's library catalogue I see some books on Creationism. Maybe we should consider the great Catholic example and BURN them all. After all, they are promoting a non-scientific view and it has nothing to do with the academic environment. What would they think about that?
Posted by: Arcturus | November 23, 2007 5:13 PM
Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley, author of Frankenstein (and daughter of atheist philospher and writer William Godwin).
Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony.
Katherine Hepburn.
Yeah, and whatever happened to "teach the controversy"? They just want to censor the side they're not on. Next time any blowhard spouts "teach the controversy" let's reply, "By pulling books from libraries?"
Posted by: Kristine | November 23, 2007 5:14 PM
The disease is spreading...
CBC:
Two other Toronto-area Catholic boards of education are studying copies of Philip Pullman's His Dark Materials trilogy after the Halton District Catholic School Board removed the children's books from its library shelves. [...]
Both the Durham and Dufferin-Peel Catholic boards have said they will also review the popular children's fantasy series.
Posted by: CalGeorge | November 23, 2007 5:15 PM
So much heat, so little light. Yes, I disagree with the policy and the way in which they implement it, but almost nothing written here bears more than an incidental resemblance to what is actually going on.
To take just one instance, the policy is that complaints trigger a move of the book from the shelves to behind the counter (where it can still be requested) while a committee reviews the complaints. In a number of cases in the past, the book in question has in fact been returned to the shelves.
I could go on, but why bother? For a "science" blog, there seems to be a distressing leap to condemnation with little regard for or interest in ... what are those awkward things called that IDiots always ignore? ... oh yes - "facts".
Posted by: Scott Belyea | November 23, 2007 5:15 PM
Peter, you could be right. Who knows what Gates *really believes* now. This is what I was referring to anyway...
Gates was profiled in a January 13, 1996 TIME magazine cover story. Here are some excerpts:
"Isn't there something special, perhaps even divine, about the human soul?" interviewer Walter Isaacson asks Gates "His face suddenly becomes expressionless," writes Isaacson, "his squeaky voice turns toneless, and he folds his arms across his belly and vigorously rocks back and forth in a mannerism that has become so mimicked at MICROSOFT that a meeting there can resemble a round table of ecstatic rabbis."
"I don't have any evidence on that," answers Gates. "I don't have any evidence of that."
He later states, "Just in terms of allocation of time resources, religion is not very efficient. There's a lot more I could be doing on a Sunday morning." So, Bill Gates doesn't go to church on a regular basis, doesn't believe much in the specific elements of Christianity, doesn't think there is any evidence for souls, doesn't know that there is any god, and doesn't consider religion very efficient. Bill Gates is definitely irreligious and is definitely agnostic. He may or may not be an atheist, but he is also definitely not the sort of person whom religious believers have in mind when they claim that religion is necessary for charitable work. Bill Gates is thus an effective demonstration that charity is possible without religion playing any role whatsoever.
Posted by: danley | November 23, 2007 5:16 PM
@12
Pretty funny stuff.
I've often wondered if the Bible wasn't written as some kind of ancient satire, and, quite possibly, an ancient, linguistic version of the Rorschach Ink BLot Test. Basically if one has a reasonable sense of humor, it can be interpreted as comedy. If read seriously, it can be interpreted as tragedy. If read neutrally, it's largely incoherent.
Posted by: Tony Jeremiah | November 23, 2007 5:17 PM
To comment #4 and comment #6
Bill Gates is an atheist. Steve Wozniak is an atheist. (Not sure about Steve Jobs.) Linus Torvalds is an atheist (His favorite book is Richard Dawkins' The Selfish Gene). Richard Stallman is an atheist. So, Christians practically have no choice but to remove all computers, which is fine because all they do with computers is spread their ignorance efficiently.
Posted by: S | November 23, 2007 5:20 PM
This must be a follow up from those emails urging christians not to see the new movie coming soon. It does nothing but the opposite, more people will be curious to see what the controversy is about the movie.
Posted by: Arcturus | November 23, 2007 5:34 PM
@12 That was excellent. You made my whole day.
Posted by: Jason | November 23, 2007 5:39 PM
Off-topic. Katha Pollitt, on the vogue of atheism, in the Nation:
There's no question in my mind that horror at militant Islam and fear of Muslim immigration lie behind at least some of the current vogue for atheism--you don't make the bestseller list by excoriating the evils of Lutheranism or Buddhism. The problem is that the more scorn one feels for religious belief, the less able one is to appreciate "reformed" or "moderate" variants of the faith. After all, pro-gay Episcopalians and liberation theology Catholics still believe in Christ, the afterlife, sin; reformed Jews still find wisdom in the Old Testament. Strictly speaking, an atheist should have no truck with any of it. But if all you can offer people is reasons to quit their religion--which also often means their community, their family, their support system and their identity--you're not going to have many takers. For every brilliant angry teenager you strengthen in doubt, there's a mosque- or churchful of people who'll choose the old-time religion if the only other choice is nothing.
Thanks for the advice, Katha.
Posted by: CalGeorge | November 23, 2007 5:40 PM
Forrest J. Ackerman
Ayaan Hirsi Ali
Russell Baker
J.G. Ballard
Iain M. Banks
Clive Barker
T. Coraghessan Boyle
Berkeley Breathed
Bill Bryson
Noam Chomsky
Roddy Doyle
Bret Easton Ellis
Harlan Ellison
Jules Feiffer
Germaine Greer
Joe Haldeman
Harry Harrison
W. P. Kinsella
Milan Kundera
Gerda Lerner
Armistead Maupin
Malachy McCourt
Frank Miller
James Morrow
Taslima Nasrin
Ramendra Nath
Robert Nozick
Julia Phillips
Katha Pollitt
Arundhati Roy
Jane Rule
Pamela Sargent
Robert Silverberg
Bruce Sterling
Gore Vidal
Sarah Vowell
Tom Wolfe
This god safe library becomes a less interesting place to visit.
Posted by: Janine | November 23, 2007 5:45 PM
danley that is interesting. Walden's book dates from 2006 so I wonder if his marriage has had an effect, you know, for the kids?
Posted by: Peter Ashby | November 23, 2007 5:50 PM
A notable addition to the list of "censured" books should be Heinlein's.
Look what he says in his books:
* Theology is never any help; it is searching in a dark cellar at midnight for a black cat that isn't there.
* Anyone who can worship a trinity and insist that his religion is a monotheism can believe anything... just give him time to rationalize it.
* Whores perform the same function as priests, but far more thoroughly.
* The Bible is such a gargantuan collection of conflicting values that anyone can prove anything from it.
Does this library hold Heinlein books? I wonder ...
Posted by: Arcturus | November 23, 2007 5:57 PM
Funny, I read about this yesterday and the money quote from the principal who took the bbok out to read to see what all the fuss* was about was "Enjoying it so far".
*All the fuss seems to have been one lone crank.
Posted by: AlanWCan | November 23, 2007 6:09 PM
"Thanks" for being so "short" and "to the point", "Scott", but "I" have to "wonder" why, if you "feel" there's no "point", you "bothered" at all?
Posted by: Brownian, OM | November 23, 2007 6:10 PM
#10:
Well, if Robert Frost has to go, they can always substitute with Helen Steiner Rice, the "poet laureate of inspirational verse".
Posted by: Susannah | November 23, 2007 6:17 PM
Re. #21: if Scott is right that any complaint "trigger[s] a move of the book from the shelves to behind the counter" and not merely complaints about atheist authorship, someone ought to lodge a complaint against the Bible and see if the schoolboard follows their own policy. I bet not.
Posted by: Peter | November 23, 2007 6:18 PM
When my older sister was in high school, my dad found out that she was supposed to read The Good Earth, A Tree Grows in Brooklyn, and The Scarlett Letter; he went to the school and demanded an alternate reading list of Christian-friendly, sex-free books. He got it, and she had to read different novels than the rest of her class all year. When I went to the same school two years later, I made sure my parents had no idea when we were assigned novels to read, because I wasn't about to go through the same embarrassment she endured.
I think you might be under the impression that this list of other books to ban might cause people like my dad to pause and think twice; but to be honest, most people like him would be pretty happy with banning every one of those titles.
Posted by: Jeff | November 23, 2007 6:19 PM
"Get rid of library computers, Bill Gates is an infidel too."
So are Steve Jobs (Apple) (Source: http://www.nndb.com/people/520/000023451/) and Linus Torvalds (Linux) (Source: http://www.nndb.com/people/444/000022378/). This amuses me.
Posted by: Alex | November 23, 2007 6:20 PM
I'd like to add; I received a stupid "warning" email about avoiding the upcoming Golden Compass movie and the novel on which it's based from my moronic Christian brother-in-law a couple of weeks ago. I had never heard of the book, but immediately shared the email with my daughter and bought two copies for us both to read :)
Posted by: Jeff | November 23, 2007 6:22 PM
They wouldn't try this crap if Harper wasn't in charge.
It's a Catholic school. Surely if you sign up for a Catholic school you get what you pay for -- the censorship of this particular book seems like the least of your problems when trying to eke an education out of a religious institution.
I refer everyone to the 1989 Sandia Labs study that George Bush the Elder requested, then ordered suppressed.
Why did he suppress it? Because he was hoping that it would say that private schools beat public schools every time. It didn't, and one big reason why was that the private schools were dominated by the parochial/religious-based outfits that refused to teach actual science, which meant that getting into an accredited college in the hopes of getting a BS or MS (much less a doctorate) was all but impossible.
Posted by: Phoenix Woman | November 23, 2007 6:25 PM
Posted by: Bob Munck | November 23, 2007 6:30 PM
Mark Twain, of course. See "The Mysterious Stranger." Best book he wrote.
Posted by: Hardy Bourland | November 23, 2007 6:37 PM
Quoth BMurray: It's a Catholic school. Surely if you sign up for a Catholic school you get what you pay for
It's a Catholic school in the province of Ontario, fully funded by my tax dollars, while still being allowed to discriminate by religion by not permitting enrollment of non-Catholic students. I'm paying, but I'm not getting what I want.
Posted by: Theo Bromine | November 23, 2007 6:41 PM
More free publicity for His Dark Materials, that's a silver lining.
Why do Catholics groups think the books are particularly against them anyway? A church where John Calvin took over and abolished the papacy is at least as much a protestant church as a catholic one. Evangelicals should pissed off, and drumming up publicity too!
Posted by: Matt Heath | November 23, 2007 6:45 PM
That is part of it. But not all. A least as much is due to fundie Xians. The Xian terrorists roaming the USA attacking and occasionally murdering MDs and scientists. The wingnuts trying to sneak creo myths into kids science classes. The theocrats trying to take over the US government with no little success. There is a backlash against these guys. A recent poll shows that 49% of the US population is sick of fundies trying to ram their ignorance down everyone's elses throats.
The most effective spokespeople for atheism are Robertson, Kennedy, Falwell, Haggard, Dobson, and their hordes of trollish brainless followers. Dawkins is way behind.
While the fanatic Moslems are probably worse, they are over there causing problems for other Moslems. The death cult Xians are over here following in their footsteps.
Posted by: raven | November 23, 2007 6:51 PM
And on the wiki list of atheists, our own eminent PZ Mighers:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PZ_Myers
Posted by: True Bob | November 23, 2007 6:54 PM
I was unaware that being atheist is now in vogue. Do I need a new wardrobe, too, now?
Morons. It isn't "in vogue", we're just mad as hell and not going to take it anymore, and the noise is getting attention.
Posted by: True Bob | November 23, 2007 6:56 PM
HP Lovecraft was also an atheist. I rather like this quote:
"If religion were true, its followers would not try to bludgeon their young into an artificial conformity; but would merely insist on their unbending quest for truth, irrespective of artificial backgrounds or practical consequences. With such an honest and inflexible openness to evidence, they could not fail to receive any real truth which might be manifesting itself around them. The fact that religionists do not follow this honourable course, but cheat at their game by invoking juvenile quasi-hypnosis, is enough to destroy their pretensions in my eyes even if their absurdity were not manifest in every other direction."
Posted by: Julie K | November 23, 2007 7:03 PM
A science section in a Catholic school? That would make interesting reading.
Posted by: Stephen | November 23, 2007 7:10 PM
I can never send you trackbacks, haloscan keeps insisting that your trackback URL isn't valid, so here's a link to what I said:
clicky
Posted by: Jake | November 23, 2007 7:18 PM
Wouldn't this list also have to include Einstein?
Posted by: SF Atheist | November 23, 2007 7:20 PM
Uh, G.B. Shaw was the only person to win both a Nobel and an Oscar ... before 2007.
Posted by: Pierce R. Butler | November 23, 2007 7:23 PM
Tulse @7:
Pullman is an atheist, but that the His Dark Materials trilogy is explicitly anti-religious (one of the protagonists sets out to kill God, after all), and explicitly anti-Catholic (at least, anti-alternative-world-Catholic).
I'm not so sure about that. Pullman's alternative-world church had a papacy based at Geneva, IIRC. For those not au fait with the two main traditions of western Christianity: the pope is, well, the pope, obviously symbolising the RC side of things. Geneva, as the adopted hometown of John Calvin, is nearly as obviously a symbol for reformed Christianity. (Frank Herbert did something similar, albeit to a different end, with his 'Orange Catholic Bible'.) Pullman didn't develop the theme at length, at least not in the two thirds of the trilogy that I read, but I'm pretty sure his intention was to suggest a unified RC/prod church as a way of saying, 'I'm not terribly interested in the varying surface details; at bottom all this Christianity is pretty much the same thing.' Not so much anti-catholic, then, as anti-western-Christianity-in-general.
Posted by: Mrs Tilton | November 23, 2007 7:27 PM
#48: Well, yes, in a way. He has explicitly denied any belief in a personal god but the many "god"-metaphors he used when talking about he cosmos make it a least plausible to view him as some kind of pantheist along the lines of Spinoza, who sees the whole of existence as divine.
Personally, I think pantheism is just a variant of atheism: if god is (in) everything - every tree, every grain of sand - then he is nothing one needs to concern oneself with. So, if someone insist on being "one with the universe", as is the case with some of the Eastern cults or among the New Age crowd then I consider that meaningless but also harmless.
Posted by: Marc | November 23, 2007 7:38 PM
I'm totally wowed out that nobody mentioned Carl Sagan...
Posted by: Willy | November 23, 2007 7:39 PM
Stephen @46:
A science section in a Catholic school? That would make interesting reading.
I am very far from a fan of the RC church, Stephen, but your comment is a little bit ignorant. The science sections of virtually all RC school libraries virtually everywhere are pretty much the same as in secular libraries. At least from the 20th c. on, the RCC has not generally been anti-science. Consider the description by Francisco Ayala of the science education he received in Spain -- Franco's Spain, in which the RCC had a chokehold on education and didn't hesitate to use the schools to indoctrinate the nation's children. What Ayala got in the science classroom was: science, full stop. No priest tried to subvert the lessons to his church's ends.
A few right-wing catholics flirt with ID creationism these days, it's true. But that is a new and a minority thing. It's also essentially an evangelical protestant thing, and I suspect the RC infatuation with ID will end soon enough, like the morning after a serious night on the tiles, as that church gets its first sober look at what it brought home the night before and gingerly extricates itself from its partner's arms lest the partner awake.
There is a list of crimes as long as both of our arms that the RC church has to answer for. But anti-science agitation really isn't very high on that list.
Posted by: Mrs Tilton | November 23, 2007 7:43 PM
The chances of no one mentioning Sagan has got to be one in...billions.
Posted by: Ferrous Patella | November 23, 2007 7:47 PM
A few more, with quotes:
I do occasionally envy the person who is religious naturally, without being brainwashed into it or suckered into it by all the organized hustles.
-- Woody Allen, Rolling Stone, 1987
What havoc has been made of books through every century of the Christian era? *** Have you considered that system of holy lies and pious frauds that has raged and triumphed for 1,500 years.
-- John Adams, letter to John Taylor, 1814
I don't have any beliefs or allegiances. I don't believe in this country, I don't believe in religion, or a god, and I don't believe in all these man-made institutional ideas.
-- George Carlin, quoted from Reuters/Variety "Notable Quotes" for April 25, 2001
Not one man in a thousand has either strength of mind or goodness of heart to be an Atheist. I repeat it. Not one man in a thousand has either strength of mind or goodness of heart to be an Atheist.
-- Samuel Taylor Coleridge, to Thomas Allsop, ca. 1820,
Knew I how to pray, to intercede for your [broken] Foot were intuitive -- but I am but a Pagan. (however, she may have been a Unitarian--which definitely isn't being a Christian)
-- Emily Dickinson, letter of 1885 to Helen Hunt Jackson
I have never seen the slightest scientific proof of the religious theories of heaven and hell, of future life for individuals, or of a personal God.
-- Thomas Edison,
My childhood was full of deep sorrows -- colic, whooping-cough, dread of ghosts, hell, Satan, and a Deity in the sky who was angry when I ate too much plumcake.
-- George Eliot,
As men's prayers are a disease of the will, so are their creeds a disease of the intellect.
-- Ralph Waldo Emerson, "Self-Reliance"
Posted by: Peter M | November 23, 2007 7:48 PM
I guess if I can find any silver lining in all of this, it's that they are well on their way to making His Dark Materials the most-read fantasy series of ALL TIME. Or, if it can't top Harry Potter, then it would at least go down as a critical classic along with all the other banned books like The Cather In The Rye. That's what I think about in order to keep myself from hurting my hands punching the walls over these snivelling anti-knowledge fuckheads and their bullshit crusades.
I nearly spit out my drink with the mention of "plausibility" too. Are we going to scrutinize C.S. Lewis' precious little stories for the plausibility of a talking lion?
Let the kids with half a brain read His Dark Materials. Then hopefully move on to Garth Ennis' Preacher when they're old enough to appreciate sex and violence and black humor. Let the tower of lies crumble.
Posted by: Rey Fox | November 23, 2007 7:52 PM
So a little mockery of a bad policy is an excess of heat?
What are we supposed to do instead? Rather than laughing at these people and writing stuff, would you rather we retired to a fainting couch somewhere?
Posted by: PZ Myers | November 23, 2007 7:57 PM
I am very disappointed in PZ's shrill discussion of this story. It is, at best, misleading, and at worst defamatory. No School Board is "screaming" to have any books removed from shelves.
As Scott pointed out -- and as all of you should have recognized if you had read the article, done a little research, etc., instead of jumping to a knee-jerk reaction -- the book was only put behind the counter (where it is still able to be checked out) while it is being reviewed.
This is standard policy when a complaint is made on any book. You can disagree with the policy that there should simply be no review process, or that reviews should be handled in a different way, but please, don't twist the situation to make it sound like the Catholic School Board of Halton is actively censoring books.
Dozens of books have been reviewed in this way because of complaints (Harry Potter, Snow Falling on Cedars, etc.) and in every single case the complaint has been soundly rejected by the Catholic School Board and the book has been returned to the shelves.
Let's also be fair and note that, while the MSM reports cite the fact that the "author is apparently an atheist" as the root of the complaint, the truth is that it has more to do with Pullman's quotes such as:
"My books are about killing God" and "I am trying to undermine the basis of Christian belief".
I have no doubt that the Halton Catholic School Board will, once again, rule that the complaint is ridiculous and the books will be back on the shelves in no time.
"I'm sure glad we can still find an occasional non-American to do something asinine and let us know that pissant prudery is a global phenomenon"
I'm actually not so sure of this -- my understanding is that the original complaint was actually a standard letter obtained from a US group that attempting to stir up trouble across North America.
Posted by: DiscoDan | November 23, 2007 7:58 PM
#27: Because of course it's only Muslims that can be scary; the Christians assassinating doctors, firebombing clinics and trying to take science out of science classes couldn't possibly convince anyone that religion is a crock.
At the very least, the fact that many people are passionately devoted to so many mutually inconsistent belief systems should be a clue that passionately devoted belief is no guarantee of truth.
Posted by: Chris | November 23, 2007 8:07 PM
It's been known since the late '60s that the version of "The Mysterious Stranger" published in 1916 is a pastiche of three manuscripts, two unfinished and one finished but not satisfactory to Twain, put together by Albert Bigelow Paine with an ending written by Paine. That version really shouldn't be considered to be authentic Twain.
http://www.ucpress.edu/books/pages/1165001.html
Paine has since been shown to have severely bowdlerized much of the material written by Twain which was published posthumously, apparently because he feared that the anti-religious, anti-patriotic views which characterized Twain's later writing would offend the public. It's only fairly recently that the unaltered texts have seen publication.
Also, the SOB falsified the identity of the immortal "G. Ragsdale McClintock"; it's only recently that I learned that there's primary evidence to prove that "McClintock" was S. Wolton Royston, not Watson as Paine had it in his Twain biography.
If you want a truly authentic taste of what Twain thought of contemporary Christianity and its followers, check out "Letters from the Earth"; recent editions should be free of censorship.
Posted by: Ktesibios | November 23, 2007 8:07 PM
Re: comment 21. You may be correct in that they are simply following policy in undertaking this review (we only have their word for that; as mentioned, we don't know how consistently they apply policy). But if we let this all happen behind closed doors, who knows what their decision will be? We have to let our outrage show right now, that this crap will not stand, so that they do put the book back on the shelves at the end. We have to stand up for intellectual freedom, as the American Library Association does with their list of banned books each year.
Posted by: Waterdog | November 23, 2007 8:12 PM
#50
Pullman's alternative-world church had a papacy based at Geneva, IIRC.
If I remember right, the office of the Pope was abolished. The headquarters moved to Geneva from Rome.
Posted by: Moses | November 23, 2007 8:13 PM
When you've got concern trolls berating you for "shrillness" in criticizing religion, it's a sure sign you're doing something right.
Posted by: Azkyroth | November 23, 2007 8:26 PM
Okay, this post should have come with a "swallow liquids first" warning. So should have several of the commenters' comments. I can think of my own list, and list of categories: As Jews are the longest offenders, they come first...
Someone mentioned Heinlein. Best quote (though lazily quoted from memory): One man's religion is another man's belly laugh. Works for me.
Posted by: Glen | November 23, 2007 8:38 PM
#30, Heinlein also said "One man's theology is another man's belly laugh". I like that one.
Posted by: Kelly | November 23, 2007 8:39 PM