Burning Osama bin Laden

The streets of America filled with jubilant crowds last night as news of Osama bin Laden's death, via a bullet through his skull, was publicly announced.

Now, let me be clear - I'm as happy that man caught nine grams of lead with his forehead as any red-blooded American can be. But I have a few questions to ask about how we prioritize things.

For instance, where were the jubilant crowds when Pastor Terry Jones burned the Koran?

This is not a facetious question.

How many national and international commentators, including Catholics, are happy that Osama was killed? I would guess, apart from a few Muslim malcontents, pretty much all of us.

Now, how many national and international commentators, including Catholics, were outraged and upset that Pastor Terry Jones burned a Koran?

Quite a lot of them.

So, let's think this through.

Which is more terrible: destroying a man's life - taking everything he has and everything he ever will have - and sending him to God's judgement unprepared, or destroying one copy of an easily reproduced book?

Is it more hateful to put a bullet into a man's head, or put a match to a bunch of paper?

What if the man whose brains you sluice against the wall repeatedly insisted that every objectionable action he took was inspired by the book that was burned?

Where comes this tremendous outcry against book-burning, yet this tremendous happiness in the destruction of a human life? And, as I said, I'm perfectly fine with this particular man being killed in exactly the way he was.

And keep in mind that the discomfort with burning books is a purely post-printing press phenomenon. Back when books were hard to create, no one had a real problem with burning books. It is only since the Enlightenment, only after burning books no longer had any real effect on the ability to access the book, that it has become such a stomach-churning event for so many.

What is it about the Enlightenment that made book burning worse than taking human life? Well, when we consider what many Enlightenment philosophers fought against, the answer becomes a lot more clear.

Voltaire didn't combat Confucianism. Rousseau didn't rant against Rastifarians. The big names among Enlightenment philosophers all fought the one philosophy that bestrode European culture like a colossus - they made their names big by trying to make the Catholic Church small.

But how do you attack the very person that defined your culture and your life? You must do what every rebellious teenager does to every parent - you must show that your parents are ignorant, backwards, and engage in shameful superstition.

So, once we examine our unexamined prejudices, is it possible to conclude that our antipathy to book-burning is not reasonable, but is, in fact, merely an antiquated expression of anti-Catholic bias?

Think about it: book burning has been common to every civilization that has had books. Yet, in the modern West, only two groups are constantly associated with the practice: Nazis and Catholics. Everybody brings up the Catholic Inquisition, nobody talks about the Protestant burning of Michael Servetus. Everybody talks about the Nazi bonfires, no one talks about the French Revolution's bonfires.

Liberals happily conflate Nazism and Catholicism all the time, but are mercilessly silent on the connections between the Nazis and the Communists or the Nazis and the "Enlightenment" or the socialists and the Muslims, for that matter.

The same liberals who romanticize the Enlightenment, the same men and women who maintain an infernal silence concerning the atrocities committed by the French Revolution's "infernal columns", these same people get upset when someone fires up a Zippo too near a copy of The Anarchist Cookbook.

Yet it was precisely the philosophy of the Enlightenment, the books written by Enlightenment philosophers, which drove the genocidal atrocities found in the French Revolution, in National Socialism and in International Socialism. It was precisely the philosophy espoused in Mein Kampf which drove Hitler's genocide. It was precisely the philosophy in Das Kapital which drove Lenin's genocide.

And it was precisely the philosophy espoused by the Koran which drove Osama bin Laden.

If we can dance on Hitler's grave, if we can thank God for Stalin's death, and if we can put a bullet through Osama bin Laden's skull, then what on earth nauseates us about putting a match to the books that embodied their beliefs and drove their actions?

Which is more likely to engender violence?

Burning a book?

Or killing someone's leader?

In this case, of course, both will engender violence, but when the Muslims riot, will we blame the US Military and President Obama for all the deaths that result?

Why is it more heinous to burn a book than to is to blow a hole in someone's head?

Perhaps it is because Catholics have burned a lot more books than they have blown holes in anyone's head. And the point is to hate Catholics.