Book Burning Called For!!

My reverence for all books, stories, and pages bound, leads me to become nauseated at the thought of any burning of books. HOWEVER, the power of words is essentially the power of IDEAS, and in fact is not bound along with the material paper and ink.

The wondrous thing about the USA is that ideas are allowed to flourish because of the freedoms explicitly, in words so carefully chosen, and brilliantly codified in the First Amendment of our Constitution. Despite our National Archives best efforts, the paper and ink of our Constitution will decay. But the ideas of this document will never decay, ever. The ideas and success of these guaranteed freedoms are in our minds, in our reason, in copies, in electronic media, in countless copies that exist in one of the first attempts to declare: "These are the rights innate to being human"; to Have Ideas and Discuss Them Freely. Including Religious Beliefs. Without Fear.

Paper and ink were merely the available media at the time in which to mark these ideas for the public to see. These ideas are with us as a people and as a global phenomenon.

Those who burn books utterly miss this point. This is a sad symbolic gesture of the past, of repression of ideas, of destruction of the only tangible media of communication at the time. It is pathetic.

Ideas, and religious beliefs, are transcendent. They cannot be destroyed by oxidation and heat. Any other reaction to this sad, limited pastor's actions endows him with a power which he does not have. He is free to believe as he does, without fear. And those who react otherwise imply that we should be afraid again. As free individuals, we are not obligated to revere that which others deem to be sacred. That is freedom of religion, freedom of speech, freedom of ideas, America at its very core.

Reason and our constitutional guarantees should make this burning a NON-event. However emotions run so, so high that many cannot see the fallacy of their reaction.

I therefore call for a disarmament of this purported event. I will select several books of great meaning and importance to me and symbolically burn them tomorrow in a safe manner. This is done to honor those who defend our right to do so; to emphasize the freedom of belief and ideas, to illustrate the truly ineffectual nature of the gesture. I know these ideas. I know these books. And so many others do too. Let him burn.