Full transcript and links:

https://sponge.ithakaonmymind.com/audio/011-will-you-burn-my-evil-books-please/

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To have my books burned would be an honor. This is what I absorbed from the last episode’s talk about exorcism and its relationship to a given entity’s face and name.

Book burning is very similar to exorcism. Well, no, let me correct that. Book burning is a form of exorcism. The slight difference is that, in most cases of exorcisms, the devil is inside a human being, whereas in book burning, the devil that is being exorcised resides within a book.

A long while ago, I heard about some religious groups that burned Harry Potter books, claiming that they’re the books of the devil. They thought the story in the book was evil because it promoted Satanism. And so they felt the need to burn a bunch of those books.

I find this infinitely amusing and laughable.

And before continuing, I would like to make a statement regarding my position on religions.

You can believe whatever you want. But when you start doing things in the name of your God or gods that destroys what other people have done, then you don’t deserve respect.

I believe there is some sort of higher force that is beyond my control. But I will never again partake in an established religion. I find it extremely offensive when someone claims that their god, especially their One God, is more important than the absence of other people’s gods.

Sometimes I think I should just call my belief system a religion, because the leeway given to religions is utterly nonsensical. Such auto respect toward religions is how countless literal murders were committed in their names, and I despise that.

So, I will laugh at nonsensical behavior like book burning, committed by some religious groups, as I please. I have zero respect for them. Why should I respect them, when they destroyed one of the manifestations of something that is as close to a religion as it gets for me, which is storytelling?

Anyway, my lack of respect for these people doesn’t stop me from finding it insanely fascinating that various religions, throughout the millennia, have attempted to trap something so shapeless and formless as a story into a shape and form, specifically in order to destroy that shape and form. I guess, just as a typical exorcist would attempt to make the devil manifest within a victim’s body, and then demand that it say its name, the book burners thought they would have power over the book once they knew the title and could see the cover, and physically destroyed them.

But unlike in the case of the devil, which seems to latch onto a physical body, which is why it tries to possess people, a story doesn’t need to latch onto anything physical. If any latching is happening, then it’s the physical that is latching onto the story, not the story latching onto the physical.

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