Saturday, June 11, 2005
Harmful Reading
Evangelical Outpost is wondering about the most "harmful" book in history. Joe makes the case for the Bible. He also makes one GREAT funny.
The point? People are evil and harmful, not ideas or words. That is why there had to be a Jesus to fulfill the law. It is people that do harm, and it is a person that can change that. That is, in my opinion, the greatest single truth of the New Testament.
...Freud?s Introduction to Psychoanalysis is directly responsible for producing Woody Allen.BUt there is a bigger point Joe makes, without exploring.
Many other works on the list are also given credit for being more influential ? and presumably more harmful ? than they deserve. Marxism is undoubtedly a harmful ideology. But the number of Marxists who have actually read "Das Kapital" is likely to be even fewer than the number of Calvinists who have read "Institutes of Christian Religion." The same holds true for "Democracy and Education," "The Course of Positive Philosophy," "Beyond Good and Evil," and "General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money." They may contain harmful ideas but the impact is largely independent of the book?s influence.That fact is true for pretty much any book. The harm is generally not the book, and often not the idea the book contains, but the way the idea flows and morphs through a population, and how the populations reacts to it. To use Joe's examplar book, the Bible contains good ideas, but it has been used and abused in many harmful ways.
The point? People are evil and harmful, not ideas or words. That is why there had to be a Jesus to fulfill the law. It is people that do harm, and it is a person that can change that. That is, in my opinion, the greatest single truth of the New Testament.
