ChilePepino Posted:

hey guys, let’s turn a discussion about books into another religious bashing thread, we never have enough of those.

This. The religion bashing gets tiring after a bit because everyone’s heard it all before.

It seems to me like the objections to religion are when religion is turned into a tool of governance. I would argue that the Bible, the Koran, the Torah, The Upanishads and basically every other “official” holy book of a major religion did influence the world and mostly for the better. No, they certainly weren’t the first written codes of morality, but they are some of the earliest that are still in use today. Granted, people do some terrible things in the name of God or religion, but not any worse than the things people do in the name of other abstract concepts like the state, freedom, or other ideologies. At the same time many wholly secular books have caused just as much suffering and death over the past 100 years as any religious tome.

For example, we could go back and forth and argue about Rachael Carson’s Silent Spring (1962) all day. Some people say it was one of the most important environmental books ever because it lead to the banning of DDT, which weakens or thins the shells of birds. At the same time, other argue that the banning of DDT has lead to hundreds of thousands of malaria deaths in the third world because DDT is the cheapest, most effective mosquito killer ever made.

Another book that I didn’t notice on either list was Francis Fukuyama’s “The End of History and the Last Man” (1992) which was essentially the beginning of the modern neoconservative movement and one of the biggest intellectual influences on America’s recent military adventurism. His thesis, summed up in a sentence, was “liberal parliamentary democracies are the best form of government and they will become more prevalent over time.” Some people misinterpreted this as “we need to do everything we can to increase the rate at which democracy spreads.” Again, there can be plenty of criticism of this book, but I don’t think it can be argued that it wasn’t influential and had a major affect upon the world.

Sorry if I was a little Log in to see images!