Burning Books

Burning books is a practice that cannot be tolerated. The burning of the Koran is no exception. Both the burning of the US flag and the burning of the Koran are protected "speech" under the First Amendment to the Constitution. But the fact that it is protected does not say it is advisable.

I do not believe that, tomorrow, some Taliban warrior will say to his buddy in the trench beside him,"Today I will not aim my rifle as close, since they talked that nut case in Florida out of burning the Koran." Being on the battle field in time of war IS dangerous and it wont get more dangerous by burning a Koran.

I object to the burning of the Koran, not on Constitutional grounds and not the grounds that it endangers our troops. I object to it on the grounds that it is the destruction of information.

The library at Alexandria was burned because of the cultural intolerance of the invading army. That burning would send the world into the Dark Ages. No telling how far the human race would be today if we hadn't lost 1500 years in our development!

The Dark Ages did not extend immediately to the Americas, but the invading hordes of the Spanish exploration eventually brought them across the Atlantic to the Aztec nation. There the Spanish, in a fit of cultural intolerance, burned almost all of the Aztec codices, the books describing the history and knowledge of the greatest civilization to its time. It was more advanced that its European contemporaries in many ways. Today we know little of that great civilization and none of its knowledge

Later, Hitler burned the "non-German" books in 1938. And today Obama would like to burn the Internet. Both because of cultural intolerance. However, today we are protected from the total loss of information because the printing press and electronics have made it possible for information to exist in more than one place.

However, we cannot accept cultural intolerance and book burning. If we allow the mind set to exist, someday we will find a civilization on a planet in another solar system and if the commander of the space ship that gets their first decides to burn the history and knowledge of another civilization, another great loss could occur. Two civilizations lost is enough.

We must not accept the cultural intolerance of the Radical Islamic Jihad.

Jim Isbell
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