Book Burning

[Thorne]

We are, after all, talking about nothing.

It's truly a tempest in a teapot!*

That's a start then. It might be necessary to debunk (scientifically, of course) each god individually, but there's nothing wrong with that.

(Pity the poor scientist who has to prove the 330 million hindu gods deities cannot exist ... maybe he'll just confine himself to proving the Supreme One cannot exist.)

It shouldn't be at all necessary. One of the maxims of the scientific method is that extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. If someone wants to make the extraordinary claim that an immortal, omniscient, omnipotent being created the universe in six days (though we're not sure why it took him so long), created men and women (though why women were needed at that point, since they weren't having sex, we don't know), placed them into a garden and told them they could have anything in that garden except that tree (Oh, now I understand why the woman was there!), then tossed them out when they ate from that tree (even though he knew they would do so even before he made the universe), then he'd better have some damned extraordinary evidence to prove his assertions. Otherwise it's not more factual than the story of Hansel and Gretel.

I imagine US law also makes people responsible for the reasonably foreseeable consequences of their actions and penalises the negligent or reckless disregard of those consequences

Yes it does, but while the consequences of this book burning were definitely foreseeable, they were anything but reasonable.


* (See Russell's teapot)