Should Atheists Censor Books Like This One…?

Buying it just to keep anyone else from seeing it is a bad idea.  That counts as a “sale” for the author and only encourages the continued publishing of drivel like this.

You bought it, it’s yours to do with it as you please.  I don’t think it makes economic sense to buy it in the first place.  The bookstore can easily order a new one, maybe even happens automatically, so maybe you’ve cleared that shelf of that one book for one week.  And you’ve put a little money into the system to have more books made.

Well, how do you feel about conservative Christians either perpetually keeping library books they don’t like checked out, or outright stealing them?

http://articles.latimes.com/1991-08-25/news/vw-2103_1_provocative-books

This was a charity bookstore, though, and I imagine that the book was a donation to the store, rather than one they attempt to keep in stock.

I don’t think the author gets any money or that they or anyone official knows a sale took place given that this was probably a used book.

Well she bought it at a thrift store.   If it were a new book, then it would count as a sale to the author but since this is 2nd hand, I don’t believe it does.

I don’t know if taking the book off the shelf did any good.  Children who would receive a book like this are already getting brainwashed.  One book more or less probably doesn’t make a difference.

As far as what to do with the book?   Use it for paper crafting.  Lots of colorful pictures would make awesome paper beads.   http://www.instructables.com/id/How-to-Make-Paper-Beads/

Yeah, no need to censor, tho I totally understand your reaction. In my family, that book would just get read alongside all the other creation myths, such as Atum, Purusha, papa and rangi etc etc, and my absolute fave, Audhumla.

Then you talk about what is actually most likely; amino acids, evolution and vast amounts of time.

To do well in our society, you need to have a good understanding of the prevailing religion. It is how it is presented, not what it says. It is a creation MYTH. My kids are teens now and still have a strong desire for truth. But I do remember how scary it was for them to be exposed to religion.

It was purchased 2nd hand.  I doubt resales have any effect on the publisher/market for a particular book.

I recommend re-purposing the nice illustrations for a fairytale book of your own. Cut them out and use them as scrapbook material or your own home made children’s book about fantasy versus reality.

Buying it from a charity shop isn’t going to support the author, it’ll support the charity. Taking it because you don’t want someone else to read it… well, that kind of edges on censorship. Buying it to take home, scan, and use in a post about just how crazy people are getting about creationism is just simple processing of information.

Best solution? Mark the book up with suggestions on how ludicrous it’s claims are and then donate it back to charity. The charity shop gets two donations for it’s cause and some child gets an introduction to critical thinking. Win-Win. 

Well, you paid for it, and it went to charity. So as long as we concede that someone could lawfully buy and hide The Magic of Reality for the same reason no matter how much we think kids should be reading the latter instead… 

But even so, taking pictures of it and posting it online for discussion still counts as a constructive use of the book – no-one could accuse you of sending it down the memory hole!

I’m a biologist. This made me laugh. Tame vegetarian lions… so were the lions’ teeth and digestive system always specialized for meat, or were the lions just so depressed after the “fall of man” that they decided to go in for some extreme reconstructive surgery?

I don’t think that buying the book was wrong. Stealing the book would have been wrong.

So now here’s a poser: when tracts are left out to take for free, is there any justification for taking more than one of each?  My inclination is, no there is not… but there is seldom-to-never a stated restriction.  Occasionally, I see “TAKE ONE” if a rack is unattended, but that’s about it.

I’m not in favor of any censorship. But your buying a single book doesn’t amount to censorship, any more than someone buying a used copy of The God Delusion. It’s when people engage in coordinated political activity to universally ban books they don’t like that I think it becomes censorship. I think it’s better to call these books out as prime examples of systematic attempts to indoctrinate children into rejecting science and evidence and rationality. Nobody can make the case for someone being a fool better than the fool himself.

 I agree but for a different reason. If you hadn’t bought the book, then whoever ended up buying it would most likely have been of that mindset anyway.
It’s not like a 4 year old would be shopping for their own books…!

You bought a book, at a bookstore, for the requested price. There is nothing remotely unethical about that, regardless of your intent in buying the book. Is it unethical for me to purchase a Bible to use as toilet paper? Absolutely not.

To turn this into a question worthy of philosophical discussion, you would need to have stolen the book. Or obtained it from a library and then “lost” it, or perhaps redacted its contents before returning it. Now the issue of ethics becomes interesting- how do you assess the situation when you have to perform an unethical act (stealing) in order to achieve an ethical end (protecting a child)? These are the sort of “is it ethical to throw a stranger in front of a train in order to save ten innocent people” questions that philosophers love to analyze.

Personally, I would not have bought the book, because it would have conflicted with my personal ethics to send any money at all to the authors and publishers of such dangerous rubbish. My approach would be to take it to the manager of the bookstore. Show them the book, explain how it conflicts with the very purpose of a bookstore and how much intellectual damage it could do to a child. Perhaps the store would be willing to remove it from inventory. That’s a sort of “censorship” I have no ethical problem with at all.

From the price of the book, I am assuming this was a used book? I could be wrong. If  it was from a used book store, then there is little danger of the item being restocked. If it was in a used book store, I might have done the same thing you did. Generally, I staunchly oppose sensorship, but a book like this is (in my opinion) unhealthy for impressionable toddlers. Just as I wouldn’t let my children read Playboy magazine, I wouldn’t let my children read that garbage. I work in a library and although it pains me, I have to destroy old and damaged books all the time (in fact, I destroyed a donated bible that was marked up and damaged just yesterday.) If the book is used, has any stains or other damage, destroy it. After all, not only is the content possibly damaging to young minds, the soiled pages can become a health risk if they develop mildew or mold. If you just can’t bring yourself to destroy it, contact JREF or CFI to see if they have any suggestions. You shouldn’t feel too bad either way, protecting children from misinformation is a good thing.

No one should censor any book.  Period.

It’s our duty to learn from books and this one teaches that creationists are not very bright 🙂

 Seconded.

Used/secondhand store purchase? Not that bad. It’s not like you’re destroying the last copy in existence. Although Amazon thinks that book hasn’t been released yet, there’s two used copies of the set out now. Getting rid of the last one might be like getting rid of the smallpox samples, but this seems just a vaccination.

And, with a secondhand purchase, it’s not like you’re sending money back to the cretins responsible for making it. Buying it new might be more problematic.

Toss it. You can think of it as carbon sequestration via landfill, if it helps. 

I censor “literature” like this all the time-by NOT READING IT! Its real easy to do! 

Although I, too, understand where you are coming from, censorship is never a good thing as previously mentioned. Not to mention a book like this might have the opposite effect that you may envision. It could help someone on the fence come to the same realizations as you i.e. that creations stories are pretty head scratching.

My wife and I kept a childrens book of Bible stories with lots of graphic images of heads on platters, people being swallowed in great floods, and fathers prepared to sacrifice their own children. I can’t wait to show this to my three year olds and I am sure they will realize that the Bible is a pretty nasty story.

Look at it this way, if you bought the book because you thought it was interesting you would still have kept that particular copy out of the hands of another child anyway.  So the concern is intent rather than the action.  I think this kind of book is dangerous to young minds but in a free society we still need to protect that type of book.  However, it shouldn’t never be found in a public school.

I have a kind of reverse problem.  My mom, who has vastly differing religious and political views from my own, occasionally send me a book that shares her views (e.g. pro-Intelligent-Design, anti-global-warming, etc.).  

I’m always a little stumped about what to do with them.  I normally give unwanted items to a local charity shop, but don’t want to encourage someone else to read these books!  Throwing books away sort of goes against the grain, but I don’t know what else to do with them.

My parents took Satanic Verses away from me just because of the title.

I’ve always been a fan of annotation of books. Counter false claims with reality. Then use it as a teaching tool.

My mother does the same thing.  I get books and magazines published by her church as “gifts” all the time.  I occasionally read them just to see what stupidity the church is up to, but usually I just recycle the magazine and shelve the books.  I, too, have a hard time throwing away books; I was raised to almost revere them, no matter what the contents.  Also, even though I disagree with my mother on religion, I don’t like to hurt her feelings by throwing out expensive books; if she sees them on my bookshelves she feels better.  I have, however, asked her to stop spending money on them – or to buy them for herself and loan them to me if I ask to read them.  I try to be diplomatic because I believe she sends them out of genuine concern.

Here’s the problems with what you did as I see them. And these involve general assumptions I know, but thats going to be the nature of this kind of talk.

1.st contrary to what some posters here have claimed, this is not like preventing a child from watching a movie or show, well it is a bit with one big caveat of… it was not your child you where trying to effect the education of. If some idiots what to teach their kids this crap, well that’s none of your business any more than it is these idiots rights to try to thwart my attempts to get my kid a copy of Origin of Species for my kid (if i had one). 

2.nd Since this was at a charity store, who did you probably prevent from buying the book? Certainly not a wealthy person, since they could just buy it at a regular store for full price. No, you economically bullied around a poorer person to force them to not teach their kids how they want. Now I know this is america and many people think that economically pushing beliefs onto others is a fundamental bedrock of society, but I assure you it’s not, and it’s just as wrong as physically doing it. At the very least you may have forced a poor person who was looking for this kind of book to have to make a greater finical sacrifice to buy such book full price at a regular store. Not cool.

Suddenly reminded of when my grandmother and her friend bought all the Ouija boards at toys r us to keep them away from kids.

That’s why I also mentioned the tactic of repeatedly checking out a disliked book from a library. An otherwise fine and normal action can become shady when it’s done for the express purpose of denying access to others.

Claudia could have bought the book as a fun coffee table book for atheist get-togethers. Or she could have bought it to more easily blog about it. But she admits the main reason she bought it was to keep it away from children. I’m not comfortable with that.

I wrote an Ask Richard column about this very same dilemma three years ago.
http://www.patheos.com/blogs/friendlyatheist/2009/07/22/ask-richard-hard-to-throw-away-books-even-gawdawful-ones/

That makes God even more appealing, doncha know? If God is that frigging looney bins vengeful and he’s on your side, that’s straight up comfort right there. (At least to some Christians.)

Which means you had to know the library carries that book without coming across it on the shelves, put forth extra effort filling out forms, and wait.

Checkout denial isn’t hard censorship, but it’s effective in much the same way car alarms are effective at making one thing enough of a pain that it gets passed over.

I didn’t buy them. Whenever I found books like this in thrift stores and the like I’d find the biggest ugliest encyclopedia thick books on the shelves and stick it behind them.

I’m not evil, I’m just keeping the good books from getting overlooked.

I went into a Half Price book store once in search of some Atheist reading, I asked the clerk where I could find that section, she pointed it out to me and while I was browsing the shelf a nice gentleman came over and looked over my shoulder for a bit. I had a hunch about what he was up to.

I bought a book and left the store and played out my hunch. A few minutes later the man came out with a bag full of books. Got into his car and drove around the back of the store. I waited until he left. Got out of my car, walked around the back, found a dumpster there, opened the lid and right on top of the other trash was the bag, took the bag out, opened it up and found all the books from the Atheism section.

Free books!! Sort of, in Tacoma it’s illegal to take trash out of the can, it now belongs to Waste Management and the owner of the business. So I took the books back into the store told them what had transpired. they looked at me with bemusement and the clerk performed the “didn’t see it, hear it or speak it” pantomime routine.

Free Books!! 

I bought a copy of “A History of Man” by L Ron Hubbard, at a thrift store. I’m glad it wasn’t censored. It continues to give us wonderful moments of hilarity. Clams!

If you had opened the book and found pictures of adult men having relations with pre-teen children would you have said okay, free speech, or would you have removed the book from circulation?

+1. Same can be said about presenting creationism in a science class. History of science is important, and, like it or not, just as the germ theory wasn’t fully accepted until late 19th century, people at one point did not have any alternative to “goddidit” when it came to development of life. Some are still clinging to that archaic belief (there are also those that still insist that the Earth is flat), and that may be silly, but we ought to know our past.

Before you just assume that smart kids will grow out of fairy tales, you should know that as a teenager I seriously considered suicide because of the conflict between what I was taught (creationism/biblical literalism) and what seemed true but in direct contradiction to it. I thought God would hate me and punish me for straying and reading false, devil-written science books.

Pulling out of that was very, very difficult, and I almost didn’t. 

I once bought a book for a similar reason. It was at the local library’s annual sale and it was an industry-standard textbook on tree care and maintenance. Unfortunately, it was old enough to include some erroneous information in support of some discredited practices. I keep it for historical context, but mainly I bought it so some amateur would not buy it and wreck their trees following bad advice.

I might get the book to use as an educational tool for my children- something to demonstrate the absurd beliefs held by irrational people. The same book in the hands of a credulous parent, however, could be quite damaging to a child. Claudia’s intent in buying the book was to ensure that some innocent child, whose education she had not control over, might be spared an iota of intellectual damage.

nope. you paid for it. it is yours to determine its fate. 

I don’t think we should censor books, but censoring requires a level of power we simply don’t have. You bought a book, you didn’t steal it. You paid the price, you can buy it for whatever reason you want and do what you please with it. This works for me because I can’t see it scaling up. No one could buy up all the copies of the book and have any impact, large sales at book stores would only result in more books printed and more people having access to it, and attempting to buy up all the used books would simply be impossible.

I’ve bought a lot of books in my life, and most of them I’ve either resold to used bookstores or passed on through book exchanges or youth hostel bookshelves. But there are a few that I’ve bought that I thought were so terrible and expressed such terrible ideas that I would not be responsible for letting them fall into someone else’s hands. Sure, people will still read that book, but I’m not responsible for it. Now I bought those books to read in the first place, so maybe that makes my choice to keep them locked away forever more defensible, but you, well you saw one copy of one book that you could take out of circulation. I’m OK with it. But don’t steal any from the library.

Over the years, a very few book have made my “Never Again!” list, but when they do, I have had no compunction about removing the offending material from the physical universe.  Nothing so dramatic as a book-burning, but a well-placed trash can serves as well.

You also have the freedom to buy a book for sale for whatever reason and do whatever you like with it once it’s your property.  Buying the book doesn’t affect anyone’s freedom of speech.

I spent a while thinking that I must be the antichrist!  Obviously there was something intrinsically evil inside of me if I was questioning the bible and wanting to explore different ideas.  For people to believe that religious teachings do no harm is just pathetically naive. 

Are you in Maine? This is how our system is set up. I can request materials, and they’ll come from any library in the state. No need for Netflix!

Oh, good grief, that’s ridiculous.  It doesn’t matter why she bought the book.  There’s likely no “poverty” test to shop at the store and buy items.  The book was for sale and she bought it.  It’s not like books are a rare commodity that take immense resources and time to produce.  It’s not like destroying the book really destroys the ideas.  She didn’t deprive anyone of anything.  I’m not planning on shopping at a thrift store today so are you trying to imply that all those who do are someone depriving ME of something that I could get more use out of than they will?  It’s just a ridiculous idea that goods must wait around until the best possible owner happens to show up to purchase them.  That’s not how the economy works!

What if she didn’t buy the book and the person who bought it did so solely to provide fodder for her kid’s craft projects.  What if she just cuts out a few pictures, discards the rest, her kids make a poster, and a few weeks later the poster is put in the trash.  MEIN GOTT!  That horrible person deprived everyone else from getting use from the book.  They even denied the OP the warm, fuzzy feeling of buying the book and putting up a blog post about it!

It’s not generally a good idea to kill animals, but if you saw a poisonous snake in a playground, you’d remove it, right?  This is no different.  You’re not advocating shutting down the publisher, you’re removing (probably futilely) one book.

Oh, folks here are taking themselves too seriously. You did nothing wrong, it’s not like you took a flamethrower to a Christian bookstore…wait, would that be wrong?
Kudos for your quick thinking.

19 mammals prominently pictured with a small scorpion, a couple frogs, and a little turtle… This book should picture only a giant pile of beetles it wants to convey at least modern animals with any accuracy.

This is a little wibbly-wobbly. The problem with the book is that it’s stating it like fact, and if it isn’t in the context of being a storybook, it could be damaging.

I think it was right of you to remove it from the situation, though. Bible stories will almost never be presented as a storybook, so you could potentially have prevented some amount of religiosity from occurring. 

As to whether it was ethical on censorship grounds: you wouldn’t try to explain violent rape to a three-year-old unless there was some pressing need to do so. Content and context vary depending on development and maturity.

Buying a book is the opposite of censorship.  The store will see that a book was purchased and order, either manually or via an automated order system.  Then the store sends money to the publisher, and the publisher will print more.  Then the publisher will give money to the author, and the author will write more.

Sooooooo.  No, you shouldn’t “censor” a book like this.  Move it over to the fantasy section.  Or ask what this is doing in the nonfiction section.  But encouraging them is LITERALLY the opposite of what I think you wanted to do.

” It’s just a ridiculous idea that goods must wait around until the best possible owner happens to show up to purchase them.” This is the cry of the social darwinist. Sorry, but economic actions have a moral component. As a hypothetical (and admittedly simple) example if a wealthy person where to buy all the coats for sale within a town just before winter, would that be a moral action if it left all those who could not “outbid” them without coats for the winter?

Wow…you’re really stretching moral obligation to the EXTREME here.  Social darwinism?  Really? 

Well, who gets to determine who “deserves” the goods the most?  You?  And what criteria are you going to make such judgments?  I don’t think you have the moral foundation to judge a dog show much less be the arbiter of who has the “right” to buy a children’s book and evaluate their reasons for the purchase (seriously, will people have to submit essays for each and every fraking loaf of bread or book they want to buy?).

There’s a reason why the market system and capitalism, for the most part, works.  It may not be the idea economic system, but it’s heaps better than communism, socialism or juche.

Nothing wrong at all with what you did!  Think of it as adding to your collection of curiousities.

When you purchase one book from the thrift store it has nothing to do with censorship.  You’re just making a purchase of something that interested you, for whatever personal reasons.  If your motives for the purchase include keeping it out of the hands of somebody else, so be it.

If you’re trying to have a book removed from the shelves of a public library – THAT’S CENSORSHIP.  There are many books I find to be objectionable in the library where I work, but our job is to provide a diverse collection to meet the needs of all community members.  I help people obtain whatever they want, and even though I think they’re nuts it’s not my place to say anything or obstruct them in any way.Would I hesitate to buy something like this from a thrift store?  Absolutely not.  I love strange things like this.  Who cares if you beat some religious family to it?  It’s a charity shop – you snooze, you lose!

It is interesting to read all of the comments on this one! I must admit, when I was comfortable enough in my atheist skin to finally got rid of all my Christian books, I threw most of them away. I do not consider this to be censorship at all. They were my books, and most of them were so flawed that they were basically rubbish. Yet they certainly had me convinced and inspired for years on end. I would rather the damage from the rubbish to end with me. 

Your buying a book is just a small step from what I did. I still don’t think it’s wrong to do what you did, but only because you were thinking of children who are not yet able to think through these things for themselves. If you went around buying books just to keep adults from reading them, that doesn’t make any sense. Adults will think and believe however they choose to do so. But kids…little tiny kids…I understand what you did. I’m not sure I’d do it too, but I get it. 🙂

I threw away $2 in a thrift store (charity shop) on the Ray Comfort edition of On The Origin of Species, and shredded the introduction. I say fair play to you.

Of course you do. The question was about censorship, though.

It wouldn’t make it into a customer’s hands – they check books for that sort of thing.

I once bought “To train up a child” by Michael and Debi Pearl. A “how to manual” for creating Stockholm syndrome, if you ask me. It’s been implicated in a few deaths and dozens of cases of “failure to thrive”.  Yes, I wanted to read it, to see if it really was as bad as I’d heard. But mostly, I wanted to keep it out of the hands of impressionable young parents lured by the promise of perfectly behaved children. I don’t feel bad about it AT ALL.

A book store likely would, and a library as well. I am guessing that charity shops don’t.

Sigh. Missed the important word ‘not’, as in ‘I’m not taking books from library shelves….’.

 Yes they do I work in a Charity shop three days a week and we check every book that comes in fortunately the charity shop I work at has a non-partisan rule and therefore any religious or anti-religious literature of any religion or group is recycled.