{"id":1636,"date":"2008-10-02T21:29:34","date_gmt":"2008-10-03T02:29:34","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.danielharper.org\/blog\/?p=1636"},"modified":"2008-10-02T21:31:48","modified_gmt":"2008-10-03T02:31:48","slug":"phillip-pullman-on-banning-books-and-religion","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.danielharper.org\/blog\/?p=1636","title":{"rendered":"Phillip Pullman on banning books, and religion"},"content":{"rendered":"

What with all the allegations that Sarah Palin wants to ban books (not true, by the way, according to Librarian.net<\/a>), it’s worth hearing what Phillip Pullman has to say about book banning in a recent opinion piece in the U.K. Guardian<\/a>:<\/p>\n

“…They never learn. The inevitable result of trying to ban something — book, film, play, pop song, whatever — is that far more people want to get hold of it than would ever have done if it were left alone. Why don’t the censors realise this?”<\/p>\n

Pullman’s book The Golden Compass<\/em> a.k.a. Northern Lights<\/em> was one of the top five books in the American Library Association’s most-challenged books of 2007 — and his experience has been that when people want to ban his books, his book sales go up.<\/p>\n

Interestingly, Pullman points out that the American Library Association reports that people challenged or banned his books for religious reasons. Pullman goes on to say this about religion in general:<\/p>\n

“Religion, uncontaminated by power, can be the source of a great deal of private solace, artistic inspiration, and moral wisdom. But when it gets its hands on the levers of political or social authority, it goes rotten very quickly indeed…. Destroying intellectual freedom is always evil, but only religion makes doing evil feel quite so good.”<\/p>\n

I think Pullman goes too far in the direction of calling for religious quietism — after all, quietist religion too often gets co-opted by authoritarian regimes which then use it to keep the masses in line. I’d put it this way:– religion should promote intellectual freedom in part by staying in a critical, adversarial relationship with civil government and civil authority. For example, from my religious point of view that adversarial relationship might well include actively promoting books that politicians might prefer went away. You know, actively promoting books like the Bible which actively challenges U.S. government policies in Iraq, because the Bible tells us to be peacemakers, which means we should not be at war in Iraq. Stuff like that.<\/p>\n

Thanks to<\/a>.<\/small><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

What with all the allegations that Sarah Palin wants to ban books (not true, by the way, according to Librarian.net), it’s worth hearing what Phillip Pullman has to say about book banning in a recent opinion piece in the U.K. Guardian: “…They never learn. The inevitable result of trying to ban something — book, film, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":6,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[46,48],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1636","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-book-culture","category-justice-peace"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.danielharper.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1636","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.danielharper.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.danielharper.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.danielharper.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/6"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.danielharper.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1636"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/www.danielharper.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1636\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1638,"href":"https:\/\/www.danielharper.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1636\/revisions\/1638"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.danielharper.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1636"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.danielharper.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1636"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.danielharper.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1636"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}