Freedom, Technology, Education
My youngest child is off to college in the fall. So it was with interest that I watched this brief interview with Julie Lythcott-Haim, previously an admissions officer at Stanford. She’s been hammering on the problem of overparenting for some years now (see her book HOW TO RAISE AN ADULT), and she speaks to this problem in the interview.
But her comments about college rankings are worth underscoring (the interview that follows begins at the point where she addresses college rankings):
Three days ago on this forum, I raised the question how long would it be before Amazon, which has now started banning videos skeptical of vaccines, starts banning books. I thought books would be safer.
But no. Tommy Robinson’s book Mohammed’s Koran has now been banned on Amazon. For the story, see here. For the Tommy Robinson page at Amazon showing that the book has indeed been removed (proof by absence), see here.
Barnes and Noble has likewise removed it. Here’s the old link that now doesn’t work. The page now reads:
Sorry, we couldn’t find what you’re looking for. Please try another search or browse our recommendations below.
I just bought the book here:
http://www.mohammeds-koran.com/store
This requires the book be shipped to me from the UK rather than from the U.S. It cost me £17.20 with shipping, or $23.41.
[Interesting piece added 3/18/19:] Amazon’s Digital Book Burning.
==================================
IN RELATED ATTACKS ON FREE SPEECH:
Amazon is now censoring videos, starting with those that raise questions about the risks of vaccines. Below is an email I sent to Jeff Bezos (jeff@amazon.com). Regardless of your views about the safety, effectiveness, and risks of vaccines, the bigger question here is one of freedom of thought and expression. If what’s essentially a glorified book vendor can not only control the market for content but also decide what content to censor, then freedom of thought and expression takes a big hit.
Here’s what I wrote to Bezos:
Jeff Bezos,
I’ve given you my business for over 20 years now and always had the highest opinion of Amazon. But I’m really getting pissed off at how you are censoring videos.
Fortunately, I bought Vaxxed (https://www.amazon.com/gp/video/detail/B01LZPZJMC/) outright, and thus can still view it. But I see that Injecting Aluminum, though on my watchlist, is no longer available (https://smile.amazon.com/gp/video/detail/B071L8H4SY/). On the page (which is no longer searchable), it reads:
Our agreements with the content provider don’t allow purchases of this title at this time.
This title is currently unavailable
I wish you wouldn’t lie to your customers. The maker of this video would be only too happy to keep distributing through Amazon. You’ve purposely made it unavailable and unsearchable.
This is a pattern and it needs to stop. What’s next? Book banning?
I have loved Amazon over the years, but it’s going to be hard for you to recover my loyalty given the ill will your censorship has created with me. Your censorship needs to stop quickly and everything you’ve banned needs to be reinstated.
–Bill Dembski
Note from author: The Bible’s teaching on hell often gets twisted so that many people dismiss both hell and the Judeo-Christian faith. Indeed, it’s common to see Christian college students struggle with the doctrine of hell almost as soon as they begin college and are confronted with non-Christian worldviews. Fundamentalism is often the problem here, promoting a doctrine of hell so extreme that no one deep down can believe it. This is not to say hell doesn’t exist. It does. But hell is also grossly abused by religious people intent on asserting religious control. Overhyped views of hell bring unnecessary scorn and embarrassment on Christianity.
Actress Jessica Alba, in a 2015 Vanity Fair article, describes the loss of her faith at age seventeen when she “fell crazy in love with a cross-dressing ballet dancer who had a baby and was bisexual. I was like, ‘There’s just no way he’s going to hell!’” Alba, it seems, reasoned that Christianity consigns a lot of good people to hell, so Christianity must be false.
To Alba’s rejection of Christianity, the conventional Christian response is, “No one is really good. We’ve all sinned. It’s only by God’s grace that we can be saved. Given our present sinful state, hell is our natural destination. It doesn’t matter whether the cross-dressing ballet dancer is a really sweet guy. Without faith in Christ, he and all others are on their way to hell.”
Was Alba familiar with this explanation of hell? Growing up as a “devout born-again Christian,” she surely was. Did she previously accept this explanation? Probably so, since her cross-dressing friend confronted her with an impossible choice: either reject Christianity or think that her friend was on his way to hell?
But what does it even mean to say “someone is going to hell”? For years I’ve watched Christians and non-Christians discuss the topic of hell, and the one lesson I’ve drawn is that we are tempted to think we know far more about people’s ultimate destinies than we actually do, and that includes confidently consigning people to hell, heaven, or none of the above. [Read more…] about The Paradoxes of Hell
Hugh Hefner died a year ago on September 27, 2017. For several years now, I imagined I would comment on Hefner’s life once he died. But then my Dad died that October of 2017, and it didn’t seem fitting to address both in the same breath. For a reflection on my Dad’s life and death, see here. I loved my Dad and thought he lived a good life. Hefner’s life, by contrast, struck me as troubled and troubling.
I’m not going to moralize here about Hefner. He’s been widely labeled and insulted, especially by Christians who loathed his lifestyle. Here, however, I’m interested in the man, what drove him, and what made him a prophetic voice of our age, even if a false prophet.
I’m no Hefner scholar (yes, such exist, for instance Steven Watts), though I’ve read a few things about him. Indeed, he was a man who loved to be in the news, so it was hard over the nearly six decades of my own life not to have heard about him periodically, especially when he did something newly outrageous.
Yet if it was just that I had read a few things about him, I wouldn’t be writing about him here. Hefner was born in 1926 in Chicago, my home town. He went to high school in Chicago. My Dad was from Chicago as was his friend G.N., both born in 1923. Hefner, G.N., and my Dad were in the service in World War II. All three went to and overlapped at the University of Illinois in Champaign-Urbana after the war as students. G.N. even remembered Hefner as selling magazine subscriptions on campus. [Read more…] about Hugh Hefner, Making Sense of His Life
Back in the early 1980s, an organization called Light of the World Ministries put out a Bible memory course: Light of the World Scripture Memory Course.
The basic course consisted of five cassettes with 100 Bible verses. The advanced course consisted of fifteen cassettes with 300 Bible verses. The Bible verses were grouped into ten on a given topic, covering such topics as faith, healing, and prayer.
Memorization in this course occurred by repetition—as the old Latin saying goes, repetitio mater studiorum (repetition is the mother of studies). Yet the approach taken in this course was not one of mere rote repetition.
The idea was to hear ten Bible verses on a given topic, with a pause after each verse to give the listener time to review the verse in one’s mind or to say it out loud. Once all ten verses had been presented in this way, then the verses were hammered home by repeating them each three times, with no pauses.
While this approach is certainly useful for meditating on Scripture and internalizing its teaching, this is also an effective way to memorize Scripture. Further, this approach could be applied as a teaching tool for many other texts. [Read more…] about Light of the World Bible Memory Course