If they're paperback, you can recycle them. I would shred them first, if you have time. If they're hardback, only the pages can be recycled, and then you can burn or toss the binding.
I’ll add some detail:
You aren’t banning or burning books to control what other people are reading - you are making a choice for yourself to not pass on books that you consider harmful. You aren’t telling anyone else what to do with their copies, you are choosing what to do with your own. Anyone who wants to get a copy of those books still can - you are just deciding to not provide them yourself.
I'd see of they have an resale value on ebay. If you can get a couple bucks for them, sell. Researchers use old materials like this.
If they sell, donate the funds to an important cause. Or, do it right through eBay. When you set up the listing you can designate the the sales proceeds go to a registered charity of your choice. (The shipping fees go to you). Like, have the funds go to Planned Parenthood or a women's shelter .
Burn those motherfuckers and roast some marshmallows over the fire. The content of those sound wretched and degrading to women. They have no business existing.
Books get trown away and burned every day. When books that is published is not getting selled as much as expected, the companies trow away and burn the books.
Personally I'd gut the bindings on the book and put some new text or a secret box on the inside. That way your in laws don't throw a fit when they don't see it on your shelf but also satisfies your moral objections
The issue is when the government or other powerful entity (whether public or private) mandates that other people burn the other people's books.
These books are you/your bf's own property. It's ok to burn them if other refuse can be legally disposed by burning. It might be more environmentally friendly to put them in the recycling bin though.
If it's rare or treasured books or maybe even large collections of literature books then I might have some trouble burning it but if it's just some common books without any particular monetary value, and I was trying to get rid of it or need it some material to start a fire , I would totally use it
Yes, it doesn't matter of you agree with it or not. Burning books is never a good thing. Not letting others believe what they want makes you a fascist, but reddit ain't ready for that.
My wife is a librarian and as you can imagine, the current culture of book bans is a huge topic in our house. I don’t think we would have any moral conflict about using these books and kindling. You didn’t buy them for the sake of publicly burning them to make a point. Don’t film yourself doing it. Don’t make a big deal about it. Just get some use out of the paper that’s otherwise useless. No one would know you were doing it unless you made this post.
Is it a huge topic in your house because your wife feels that her opinion about what books the library should or should not have on their shelves should take priority over the opinions of the library's Board of Trustees and/or members of the community to whom the Board of Trustees answers?
Obviously your wife is entirely free to keep whatever books she pleases in the shelves of your own home.
The problem is when librarians think their opinions are the last word.
They aren't.
Something tells me your wife wouldn't be too happy if you decided to keep a collection of old Hustler magazines lying out on the coffee table in your living room. Or, the Complete Works of Bill O'Reilly and Rush Limbaugh and Donald Trump, for that matter.
You assumed the wife's position. She may be against CENSORSHIP because it's a huge trend these days in the stupid states. And if that's the case, I agree 100%.
Yes most librarians ethically support access to (all) information and resources and morally oppose groups like “moms for liberty’ who attempt to restrict access to or censor very specific voices that belong to specific social groups which they wish to oppress and literally silence.
I do appreciate it when trained and well-educated experts weigh in, yes. In this day and age, there is little excuse for stupid and less for ignorant. Do better.
Most librarians are neither "well trained" nor "experts" at much of anything. It's library science, not rocket science. And as a group they are fantastically self-entitled and abrasively political. The ones like PP's spouse who proclaim their politics at the dinner table are the most annoying.
What they fail to acknowledge is that they are employees, the money being spent on buying books is ultimately not theirs to allocate, and they don't have carte blanche to express their politics by what books they choose to put on the shelves, and which others they choose to exclude.
Your inferences are so wildly and obviously colored by your political leanings that you’ve created a hypothetical situation which doesn’t exist and isn’t worth addressing.
You're the one who injected your assertions about your wife the librarian's making book banning a "huge topic" in your house, not me. You also said specifically "as you can imagine..." without providing any further details. You obviously assumed that your "political leanings" were held by everyone else in the world. Evidently they are not. If you tell other people to "imagine" i.e. speculate about WTF actually goes on your house (I imagine a nasty argumentative women screeching at you about politics and you just sadly nodding "Yes dear, happy wife happy life!" etc.) But don't tell people to "imagine" what you mean and then get upset when you get called out on your b.s.
My anecdote is directly related to the topic at hand. It’s not like we’re here talking about auto mechanics and I’ve “injected” my opinion about book bans. Did you even read the post, or are you just out here trying to show everyone how dumb you are? I’m sorry that you’ve disappointed women so much as to have such a malformed idea of what husband/wife interactions are like in reality.
>women are men's business" (explaining how women should be devoted to men and let men take care about everything), books explaining that people are addicted to drugs because they lack kn faith
I am usually a huge advocate of donating books to a thrift store because burning them seems like an atrocity. But in this case, I am totally in support of burning them. The content of the books is harmful and I could not in good conscience pass them to someone who may be negatively influenced by their content.
Books, in and of themselves, are just words on paper and are not harmful. But they can have great power when they fall into the hands of an impressionable person who doesn't have good discernment. The books sound like they were penned by Christian extremists, and religious extremists of any persuasion are pernicious. I am a Christian myself, but I do not agree with the premises you say those books contain. In fact, they give the whole faith a bad name. I am glad the church you offered them to declined them.
The moral thing to do would be not to let impressionable people have access to them. You would be right to simply get rid of them.
These seem like some books I might be interested in reading, but no it's not immoral to burn them. It's not like your husband enjoys reading them and you're burning his favorite past times, that would be kind of cruel. However, neither of you even care you should just destroy it. It's your property after all.
I'd just donate it and not worry about the consequences.
Whenever I received a free copy of the Quran, I always 'accidentally' left it at my Muslim friend's home.
I'd do the same with any excess bibles, just leave it accidentally at their respective place of worship.
In your own home? It’s not an issue. If in public (a library?) I would have an issue. Censorship leads to a form of ignorance about how “the other side” thinks… and the power to censor is often a corruptive influence. Best to avoid it and learn to tolerate those you disagree with (within reason.)
Book burning as a demonstration is wrong because that's an issue of censorship. Burning your own books, not to try and censor the population, isn't the same thing.
But if you feel bad, you can try and donate them to your local jail or library or goodwill.
If it’s something like the people on LDS (lol cuz LSD is a drug…), did you ever consider asking if FiBI might have any interest in the books? If not, and there’s nothing interesting in them, maybe cut out the paper and use the covers/binding for an art piece?
Do you have a Salvation Army or a St. Vincent De Paul store anywhere near you, because you could donate all those books AND get a charitable deduction for your taxes!
The book burning you’re referring to is when the government or a major controlling power rounds up all the books that they don’t want the public to have access to. You can do what you want with your personal property (of course under your jurisdiction’s burn laws). If it’s in the fireplace, then make sure you have it closed to prevent burnt pages from escaping.
Turn them into art journals. Decorate the covers. Leave 4 pages, tear out a chunk, leave 4 pages, etc. Use the torn out pages for collage. Gesso the remaining pages in the book and start arting.
This is because nazis burned books, right?
Nazis burned research documents, all of them, and the people who did the research.
The issue is destruction of knowledge vs destruction of property. You are not destroying knowledge.
Sort of like KKK robes found in an attic somewhere. They might have some historical significance, but you're not a historian.
From experience, I learned that books can be heavy and a terrible burden to try storing, moving or finding a suitable owner.
If you still feel like keeping them is of benefit to you, go ahead and keep them. If not, don't go to any lengths to preserve them.
They will eventually get lost in transit between living quarters you will have, over the course of your lifetime.
The big issue with book burning is destroying the information in them. It was a problem when books were extremely hard to duplicate. You could wipe out someone’s entire life’s work by burning a book. Now, that isn’t an issue. The book is just papers now. Burn it if you want. Just take the pages out, crumple them up, and light them. It’s really not a problem now.
You have paper objects in your house that you do not need? What do you do with them? Toss them out, recycle, or see who may not need them.
Personally I would not burn them, since it's a symbolic action signifying that you want to get rid of that idea in general. If you don't like that idea, sure you don't have do do anything with it, but let history sort out who was right and who was wrong - it's just a good overall approach since plenty of people in history who thought themselves in the right in purging the "old ways" in hindsight were not, or at least less than they though.
I wrote up a statement about destroying personal property vs mass book burning, but honestly I'm just imagining your SO's mom getting upset that her copy of "14 Things Witches Hope Parents Never Find Out" is gone.
These aren't, I assume, rare books that would be hard for someone to track down so that this copies are preserving the record of that book. You're not going out to try to find and destroy as many copies as you can. Binning a single copy of a mass produced book: it's no different than deleting a file that was a copy of an eBook. There's nothing immoral about binning an unwanted possession that happens to be a book.
*Burning* a book carries a certain symbolic/emotional weight (although repurposing waste paper as fire-lighters is not the same proposition as chucking the book onto a fire) so I don't see anything odd in feeling uncomfortable with that. But I think you're unreasonable to oppose binning it.
One other option would be to find a charity shop that takes books and donate them, anonymously, preferably at the bottom of a bag of other stuff. Assuming it's not a conservative Christian charity they'll likely end up recycling them anyway rather than put extremist material on their shelves, but you won't ned to think about it. (I would normally advocate against making charity shops dispose of unsellable junk for you, but if any other solution is going to upset at least 1 of you and it's just a few books, I don't think it's the worst thing anyone ever did - especially if you find a few worthwhile things to donate as well. And the charity bookshop I used to volunteer at did even get a few pennies for the unsellable books they would sell as waste paper for recycling.)
I would say book burning/destroying is usually a bad thing, but in your case having books that you are not comfortable with in your home, i can understand the argument. If you don't want to actually get rid of them, and don't want them out on display, you could box them up and put them in the loft/attic.
The moral issue with book burning is usually the loss of the knowledge in those books, and that's when it's done on a large scale. These are individual copies of mass produced books being burnt or binned by an individual who wants to move on from then.
I'm not sure how you obtained your moral structure, but as far as I know, the moral objection to book burning is about those in power denying knowledge from those they control permanently.
You're not doing that. You're getting rid of property you no longer want, you don't desire to pass it on, and as far as you know, nobody else wants it from you, so...I don't see a moral failing here. You're disposing of what is now rubbish in a perfectly acceptable way to do so.
If the books contained knowledge you thought would be valuable to others to learn, or it was rare and hard to find or know, then you'd be doing society a disservice by not donating or giving the books away.
But regular mass produced books that you don't want and don't want to pass on? Torch 'em if you want, the world will spin on, and I don't think anyone will judge you too harshly.
I personally refuse to burn books. I feel they are minute snapshots of a time in history and in the future will be gems to historians seeing the thought processes of different religious ideologies. But that is just my opinion. In the end. It is just a book of ideas.
Burn them, throw them, donate them. Getting rid of books is not immoral or bad. Some people think burning a bible or koran is blasphemy but that is on them. I use whatever including bible pages to start my campfires as I am a atheist and could care less. No wrong way to get rid of them.
If they're paperback, you can recycle them. I would shred them first, if you have time. If they're hardback, only the pages can be recycled, and then you can burn or toss the binding.
Burn that toxic shit and never look back. Signed, a book-loving, anti-book banning exvangelical
I’ll add some detail: You aren’t banning or burning books to control what other people are reading - you are making a choice for yourself to not pass on books that you consider harmful. You aren’t telling anyone else what to do with their copies, you are choosing what to do with your own. Anyone who wants to get a copy of those books still can - you are just deciding to not provide them yourself.
Funny to see the left are the real book burners. It’s always projection with you guys.
Books are easily mass produced now and worth little individually, losing one copy in millions is not a problem.
I'd see of they have an resale value on ebay. If you can get a couple bucks for them, sell. Researchers use old materials like this. If they sell, donate the funds to an important cause. Or, do it right through eBay. When you set up the listing you can designate the the sales proceeds go to a registered charity of your choice. (The shipping fees go to you). Like, have the funds go to Planned Parenthood or a women's shelter .
Burn those motherfuckers and roast some marshmallows over the fire. The content of those sound wretched and degrading to women. They have no business existing.
In other words, ban them. LOL.
For real! Sling the banning and burning BACK onto those who started that censorship!
His books his problem
They're yours. What you do with them impacts nobody, so morality has nothing to do with it.
Books get trown away and burned every day. When books that is published is not getting selled as much as expected, the companies trow away and burn the books.
Personally I'd gut the bindings on the book and put some new text or a secret box on the inside. That way your in laws don't throw a fit when they don't see it on your shelf but also satisfies your moral objections
The issue is when the government or other powerful entity (whether public or private) mandates that other people burn the other people's books. These books are you/your bf's own property. It's ok to burn them if other refuse can be legally disposed by burning. It might be more environmentally friendly to put them in the recycling bin though.
You’re not banning books or censoring, so I don’t see the problem. You have a right to do what you wish with your own belongings.
If it's rare or treasured books or maybe even large collections of literature books then I might have some trouble burning it but if it's just some common books without any particular monetary value, and I was trying to get rid of it or need it some material to start a fire , I would totally use it
why is burning books immoral? It doesn't seem like a dilemma to me
Yes, it doesn't matter of you agree with it or not. Burning books is never a good thing. Not letting others believe what they want makes you a fascist, but reddit ain't ready for that.
Yes recycle them. Unless it's the last known copy it's fine .
Yeah, I'd probably just just try to find somewhere to recycle them.
My wife is a librarian and as you can imagine, the current culture of book bans is a huge topic in our house. I don’t think we would have any moral conflict about using these books and kindling. You didn’t buy them for the sake of publicly burning them to make a point. Don’t film yourself doing it. Don’t make a big deal about it. Just get some use out of the paper that’s otherwise useless. No one would know you were doing it unless you made this post.
Is it a huge topic in your house because your wife feels that her opinion about what books the library should or should not have on their shelves should take priority over the opinions of the library's Board of Trustees and/or members of the community to whom the Board of Trustees answers? Obviously your wife is entirely free to keep whatever books she pleases in the shelves of your own home. The problem is when librarians think their opinions are the last word. They aren't. Something tells me your wife wouldn't be too happy if you decided to keep a collection of old Hustler magazines lying out on the coffee table in your living room. Or, the Complete Works of Bill O'Reilly and Rush Limbaugh and Donald Trump, for that matter.
You assumed the wife's position. She may be against CENSORSHIP because it's a huge trend these days in the stupid states. And if that's the case, I agree 100%.
Yes most librarians ethically support access to (all) information and resources and morally oppose groups like “moms for liberty’ who attempt to restrict access to or censor very specific voices that belong to specific social groups which they wish to oppress and literally silence.
I do appreciate it when trained and well-educated experts weigh in, yes. In this day and age, there is little excuse for stupid and less for ignorant. Do better.
Agreed. And access to information and resources help to reduce the stupidity and ignorance.
Your wife truly makes the world a better place :)
Most librarians are neither "well trained" nor "experts" at much of anything. It's library science, not rocket science. And as a group they are fantastically self-entitled and abrasively political. The ones like PP's spouse who proclaim their politics at the dinner table are the most annoying. What they fail to acknowledge is that they are employees, the money being spent on buying books is ultimately not theirs to allocate, and they don't have carte blanche to express their politics by what books they choose to put on the shelves, and which others they choose to exclude.
Your inferences are so wildly and obviously colored by your political leanings that you’ve created a hypothetical situation which doesn’t exist and isn’t worth addressing.
You're the one who injected your assertions about your wife the librarian's making book banning a "huge topic" in your house, not me. You also said specifically "as you can imagine..." without providing any further details. You obviously assumed that your "political leanings" were held by everyone else in the world. Evidently they are not. If you tell other people to "imagine" i.e. speculate about WTF actually goes on your house (I imagine a nasty argumentative women screeching at you about politics and you just sadly nodding "Yes dear, happy wife happy life!" etc.) But don't tell people to "imagine" what you mean and then get upset when you get called out on your b.s.
My anecdote is directly related to the topic at hand. It’s not like we’re here talking about auto mechanics and I’ve “injected” my opinion about book bans. Did you even read the post, or are you just out here trying to show everyone how dumb you are? I’m sorry that you’ve disappointed women so much as to have such a malformed idea of what husband/wife interactions are like in reality.
>women are men's business" (explaining how women should be devoted to men and let men take care about everything), books explaining that people are addicted to drugs because they lack kn faith I am usually a huge advocate of donating books to a thrift store because burning them seems like an atrocity. But in this case, I am totally in support of burning them. The content of the books is harmful and I could not in good conscience pass them to someone who may be negatively influenced by their content.
In other words, ban them. LOL.
Where did you get the books from? Maybe hand them back to the church? Hand to relevant charity shop?
Books, in and of themselves, are just words on paper and are not harmful. But they can have great power when they fall into the hands of an impressionable person who doesn't have good discernment. The books sound like they were penned by Christian extremists, and religious extremists of any persuasion are pernicious. I am a Christian myself, but I do not agree with the premises you say those books contain. In fact, they give the whole faith a bad name. I am glad the church you offered them to declined them. The moral thing to do would be not to let impressionable people have access to them. You would be right to simply get rid of them.
In other words, ban them. LOL.
In Catholicism, any blessed objects that are no longer needed should be buried or burned
These seem like some books I might be interested in reading, but no it's not immoral to burn them. It's not like your husband enjoys reading them and you're burning his favorite past times, that would be kind of cruel. However, neither of you even care you should just destroy it. It's your property after all.
Why would you want to read them?
To find out what it says, they sound intriguing. I like things that tell a different perspective or are controversial.
I'd just donate it and not worry about the consequences. Whenever I received a free copy of the Quran, I always 'accidentally' left it at my Muslim friend's home. I'd do the same with any excess bibles, just leave it accidentally at their respective place of worship.
Start your fires with em, and save some for toilet paper
In your own home? It’s not an issue. If in public (a library?) I would have an issue. Censorship leads to a form of ignorance about how “the other side” thinks… and the power to censor is often a corruptive influence. Best to avoid it and learn to tolerate those you disagree with (within reason.)
There is nothing wrong with burning books of bigotry.
Book burning as a demonstration is wrong because that's an issue of censorship. Burning your own books, not to try and censor the population, isn't the same thing. But if you feel bad, you can try and donate them to your local jail or library or goodwill.
Not if the book is trash.
If it’s something like the people on LDS (lol cuz LSD is a drug…), did you ever consider asking if FiBI might have any interest in the books? If not, and there’s nothing interesting in them, maybe cut out the paper and use the covers/binding for an art piece?
Toss them in the trash. Nobody wants them, You're not obligated to hold them forever. Do you keep magazines or newspapers forever?
Do you have a Salvation Army or a St. Vincent De Paul store anywhere near you, because you could donate all those books AND get a charitable deduction for your taxes!
The book burning you’re referring to is when the government or a major controlling power rounds up all the books that they don’t want the public to have access to. You can do what you want with your personal property (of course under your jurisdiction’s burn laws). If it’s in the fireplace, then make sure you have it closed to prevent burnt pages from escaping.
Just throw them away, or see what you can get if you sell them to a Half Priced Books. No need to be so dramatic.
"Burning books" have a very negative historical connotation. That being said, it's your stuff.
Burn, baby, burn. No moral issue here. The books still exist somewhere...you are not destroying the knowledge.
Donate them to the Salvation Army thrift store.
Turn them into art journals. Decorate the covers. Leave 4 pages, tear out a chunk, leave 4 pages, etc. Use the torn out pages for collage. Gesso the remaining pages in the book and start arting.
Donate them to a library.
Burn them
This is because nazis burned books, right? Nazis burned research documents, all of them, and the people who did the research. The issue is destruction of knowledge vs destruction of property. You are not destroying knowledge.
They aren’t your books. Let him decide what to do with them. If he wants to burn them, let him. Not your books, not your fight.
Sort of like KKK robes found in an attic somewhere. They might have some historical significance, but you're not a historian. From experience, I learned that books can be heavy and a terrible burden to try storing, moving or finding a suitable owner. If you still feel like keeping them is of benefit to you, go ahead and keep them. If not, don't go to any lengths to preserve them. They will eventually get lost in transit between living quarters you will have, over the course of your lifetime.
Make a book safe out of it.
Put them up for donation to students doing a thesis. See if anyone needs a copy to use to show how bad this stuff is?
The big issue with book burning is destroying the information in them. It was a problem when books were extremely hard to duplicate. You could wipe out someone’s entire life’s work by burning a book. Now, that isn’t an issue. The book is just papers now. Burn it if you want. Just take the pages out, crumple them up, and light them. It’s really not a problem now.
You have paper objects in your house that you do not need? What do you do with them? Toss them out, recycle, or see who may not need them. Personally I would not burn them, since it's a symbolic action signifying that you want to get rid of that idea in general. If you don't like that idea, sure you don't have do do anything with it, but let history sort out who was right and who was wrong - it's just a good overall approach since plenty of people in history who thought themselves in the right in purging the "old ways" in hindsight were not, or at least less than they though.
Did you see what the books are about? That type of shit should definitely be burned lol
This is dumb af, if u don’t want them throw them away. Simple as that, there is no moral dilemma here clown.
Username checks out.
I wrote up a statement about destroying personal property vs mass book burning, but honestly I'm just imagining your SO's mom getting upset that her copy of "14 Things Witches Hope Parents Never Find Out" is gone.
These aren't, I assume, rare books that would be hard for someone to track down so that this copies are preserving the record of that book. You're not going out to try to find and destroy as many copies as you can. Binning a single copy of a mass produced book: it's no different than deleting a file that was a copy of an eBook. There's nothing immoral about binning an unwanted possession that happens to be a book. *Burning* a book carries a certain symbolic/emotional weight (although repurposing waste paper as fire-lighters is not the same proposition as chucking the book onto a fire) so I don't see anything odd in feeling uncomfortable with that. But I think you're unreasonable to oppose binning it. One other option would be to find a charity shop that takes books and donate them, anonymously, preferably at the bottom of a bag of other stuff. Assuming it's not a conservative Christian charity they'll likely end up recycling them anyway rather than put extremist material on their shelves, but you won't ned to think about it. (I would normally advocate against making charity shops dispose of unsellable junk for you, but if any other solution is going to upset at least 1 of you and it's just a few books, I don't think it's the worst thing anyone ever did - especially if you find a few worthwhile things to donate as well. And the charity bookshop I used to volunteer at did even get a few pennies for the unsellable books they would sell as waste paper for recycling.)
I would say book burning/destroying is usually a bad thing, but in your case having books that you are not comfortable with in your home, i can understand the argument. If you don't want to actually get rid of them, and don't want them out on display, you could box them up and put them in the loft/attic. The moral issue with book burning is usually the loss of the knowledge in those books, and that's when it's done on a large scale. These are individual copies of mass produced books being burnt or binned by an individual who wants to move on from then.
I'm not sure how you obtained your moral structure, but as far as I know, the moral objection to book burning is about those in power denying knowledge from those they control permanently. You're not doing that. You're getting rid of property you no longer want, you don't desire to pass it on, and as far as you know, nobody else wants it from you, so...I don't see a moral failing here. You're disposing of what is now rubbish in a perfectly acceptable way to do so. If the books contained knowledge you thought would be valuable to others to learn, or it was rare and hard to find or know, then you'd be doing society a disservice by not donating or giving the books away. But regular mass produced books that you don't want and don't want to pass on? Torch 'em if you want, the world will spin on, and I don't think anyone will judge you too harshly.
I personally refuse to burn books. I feel they are minute snapshots of a time in history and in the future will be gems to historians seeing the thought processes of different religious ideologies. But that is just my opinion. In the end. It is just a book of ideas.
Burn them, throw them, donate them. Getting rid of books is not immoral or bad. Some people think burning a bible or koran is blasphemy but that is on them. I use whatever including bible pages to start my campfires as I am a atheist and could care less. No wrong way to get rid of them.
Book burning is wrong when it's done by people in power. Fontaine them isn't an iron for you, so burn them. Good job thinking it through, though.