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God Against the Gods

Monotheism, for example, cruelly punishes the sin of "heresy," but polytheism does not recognize it as a sin at all. Significantly, "heresy" is derived from the Greek word for "choice," and the fundamental theology of polytheism honors the worshipper's freedom to choose among the many gods and goddesses who are believed to exist. Monotheism, by contrast, regards freedom of choice as nothing more than an opportunity for error, and the fundamental theology of monotheism as we find it in the Bible threatens divine punishment for any worshipper who makes the wrong choice. [emphasis mine]

"Opportunity for error" is the operative phrase here, and perhaps explains the impulse toward censorship amongst so many of the devout.

Today ...

• Dan Brown's The Da Vinci Code is banned in various and sundry theocracies throughout the world, and the book will be seized if it is found in your luggage at a border crossing.
• There are already calls for banning the movie.
• Muslims throughout the world are having regular fits because a Danish newspaper published a cartoon depicting Muhammed in an unflattering way.

I imagine that, one and all, the censors believe they are doing a good thing because they're acting to eliminate an "opportunity for error."

Censorship is for your own good, don't you know? And if it should work to keep the prevailing gang on top, well ... isn't that just a sign of His pleasure?

Which is not to suggest that only religious impulses give rise to censorship, but that religious censorship arises from a deeper, and therefore more resolute and correspondingly dangerous, motive than the mere love of power that animates, say, China's dictators. What is more, at least in the eyes of the censor, its successes affirm its rightness.

Bill Gates remarked yesterday something that I pointed out last week in connection with Google's entry into China: It's utterly meaningless that Google has agreed to honor Chinese law because human ingenuity is so great, and the Internet so big, that end-running the censors is child's play. Yet another means of communicating must be counted a net positive for human liberty.

"The ability to really withhold information no longer exists," he told a news conference in Lisbon as part of a Microsoft-sponsored forum.

"You may be able to take a very visible Web site and say that something shouldn't be there, but if there is a desire by the population to know something, it is going to get out," he added.

Precisely so. Maybe Gates reads this site for talking points.

I remarked above that I'm not far enough into God Against the Gods to make a recommendation, but I am willing to recommend H.L. Mencken's Treatise on the Gods, a less in-depth survey of much of the same material, a sort of comparative religion course that's actually well-written and interesting. Though the book is largely forgotten now, Mencken believed it was the best of his many books and, for an accessible history of religion from the day the first caveman shook his fist at a lightning bolt through the date of its publication, 1930, you really can't do better.

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