Books That No One Should Read

[Cain]

Influential =/= good reading.  Mein Kampf was influential, and it was still crap.  Kant's Critique of Pure Reason was influential, and also crap.  The Koran is hella influential, and possibly even more shit than the Bible (more coherent, but less psychedelic apocalyptic imagery to make up for wading through hundreds of pages of crap).

And if I wanted to know my enemy, why would I read the Bible?  Its clear they haven't, or else we wouldn't be having a problem.

The funny thing about knowledge is that not everything worth knowing is fun to learn.

Keep shifting those goal posts.

Now wtf are you talking about?
The thread is called "books that no one should read", not, "books that we don't particularly enjoy." At St. John's College in Annapolis, which is not really religiously affiliated (despite its name), major religious texts are required reading. This is not because the school promotes the beliefs conveyed in those texts, but because they have had such a major impact on society since they were written that any intelligent, well rounded individual should be familiar. The Principia Discordia isn't exactly a brilliant piece of literature either, or anyway, it has no more literary merit than the bible. I could preach misinterpretations to a bunch of people too and have them turn it into something gross, and would you then say because of those people that nobody should read the Principia anymore as well?

Who said anything about society?

Oh yeah, you.

I said it was a crap piece of writing with no real influence, a fact that can be verified by, a) reading the whole thing or b) reading the Sermon on the Mount (10 minutes) then going to a Christian Church and seeing what they preach (homophobia, hatred, ethnocentrism, conformity to authority etc).

Reading Plato, Aristotle, Aquinas and Augustine will tell you a thousand times more about Christianity than a shitty piece of Jewish literature.  Studying the economic and political power of the Vatican and the collapse of Rome will tell you more about the society of the Middle Ages than reading the Bible.  In fact, when you list all the things that can tell you about the world as it really is, and Christians as they really act, the Bible is near the bottom of the list.  The Bible can barely tell us about Jesus's own time, or Jewish history, so riddled with factual errors, grandiose claims based on religious impulse and stripped of any socio-economic factors as it is.  Its only use is to show up Christians engaged in acts of hypocrisy, and since they cannot grasp that concept (Altermeyer's The Authoritarians makes the case for mental compartmentalization among authoritarian followers), there is no real point in doing so anyway.

BUT BUT BUT YUO HAVE TO READ THA BIBLE, RITE?  CUZ, UM, ITS LIEK, UH, VERY IMPORTANT AND STUFF?

[LMNO]

And if I wanted to know my enemy, why would I read the Bible?  Its clear they haven't, or else we wouldn't be having a problem.

And nB:  Students have to read a lot of crap books at school.  St Johns even more so.  They have to read Ptolemy, even.  In the original Greek.  And that fucker was a geocentrist.


LMNO
-lived in Annapolis, partied with the Johnnies.

[Triple Zero]

The funny thing about knowledge is that not everything worth knowing is fun to learn.

that doesn't mean you should know it.

[A.N. Other]

The thread is called "books that no one should read", not, "books that we don't particularly enjoy."

Um...it may be just me, but if you don't particularly enjoy a book, I think you wouldn't recommend it as a good read.

[Cainad (dec.)]

The Best of nostalgicBadger on PD.com, by nostalgicBadger

It isn't worth the paper it's printed on. The only reason I didn't gouge my eyes out after reading it was because my health insurance doesn't cover fail-related injuries.

[BADGE OF HONOR]

lol thread ruined

[Soup]

Science and Beauty by Isaac Asimov
All Double Bubble comics. All Double Bubble comics. Pud's new holier than thou attitude is horrible.

[Iason Ouabache]

Who said anything about society?

Oh yeah, you.

I said it was a crap piece of writing with no real influence, a fact that can be verified by, a) reading the whole thing or b) reading the Sermon on the Mount (10 minutes) then going to a Christian Church and seeing what they preach (homophobia, hatred, ethnocentrism, conformity to authority etc).

Reading Plato, Aristotle, Aquinas and Augustine will tell you a thousand times more about Christianity than a shitty piece of Jewish literature.  Studying the economic and political power of the Vatican and the collapse of Rome will tell you more about the society of the Middle Ages than reading the Bible.  In fact, when you list all the things that can tell you about the world as it really is, and Christians as they really act, the Bible is near the bottom of the list.  The Bible can barely tell us about Jesus's own time, or Jewish history, so riddled with factual errors, grandiose claims based on religious impulse and stripped of any socio-economic factors as it is.  Its only use is to show up Christians engaged in acts of hypocrisy, and since they cannot grasp that concept (Altermeyer's The Authoritarians makes the case for mental compartmentalization among authoritarian followers), there is no real point in doing so anyway.

BUT BUT BUT YUO HAVE TO READ THA BIBLE, RITE?  CUZ, UM, ITS LIEK, UH, VERY IMPORTANT AND STUFF?

[Requia ☣]

I've never regretted reading a book.

[Triple Zero]

I've never regretted reading a book.

now that you mention it, me neither. if it was really that bad, i'd give up halfway through or something.

i have regretted buying a book, though.

[A.N. Other]

I've never regretted reading a book.

now that you mention it, me neither. if it was really that bad, i'd give up halfway through or something.

i have regretted buying a book, though.

True, the reading of a book, good or bad, isn't the thing to regret. I personally find it the time wasted on a book that wasn't all that good was the biggest loss. That and the money I spent on it. So I have to agree with the both of you.

[Rococo Modem Basilisk]

I have to say, if you find it important to have books in a style that keeps you from falling asleep, stay away from anything by PKD (especially prior to A Scanner Darkly, which is the first book he wrote off cocaine) and also anything by Asimov. IMO, they have the most absurdly NORMAL (and therefore boring as hell, since they don't have a voice and they sound like a newspaper reporter post anal-editing), despite having interesting ideas.

Also, if you find anything by an ex-WWII-military person about "the hidden power of believing" (I've come across several books like this, all exactly the same except for the title and the author), don't bother getting it: it's basically the simplest tenets of chaos magic written in boring language, and puffed up with enough invented anecdotes to make it barely fill a small book.

[Manta Obscura]

I have to say, if you find it important to have books in a style that keeps you from falling asleep, stay away from anything by PKD (especially prior to A Scanner Darkly, which is the first book he wrote off cocaine) and also anything by Asimov. IMO, they have the most absurdly NORMAL (and therefore boring as hell, since they don't have a voice and they sound like a newspaper reporter post anal-editing), despite having interesting ideas.

I disagree about the Asimov. I love his short stories.

As for books that no one should read/buy:

"The Pearl" by John Steinbeck (simplistic moral-message plot and flat characters).
Anything by L. Ron Hubbard (because he's just pretty mediocre).
Anything by Anne Rice (same as L. Ron Hubbard. Also, science has proven with a 99% CI that vampires suck balls).


I concur with everyone who said not to read the Bible, excepting a few parts:
1) The Song of Solomon.
2) Some of the Psalms.
3) Some of the stuff Jesus said.
4) The Book of Job.

[Rococo Modem Basilisk]

Actually, I agree about his short stories. If they're short enough, you can stay awake just long enough to finish one.

As for the bits of the bible to read, you forgot the heretical bits. Some bits of the book of Enoch are supposed to be good, and I hear some good things about the book of Jubilees. Genesis is interesting if you consider it the output of machine translation (according to historians, Genesis is actually translated into hebrew from caananite, from akkadian, from sumerian, with heavy censoring from the deutronomists in the ugartic stage between caananite and hebrew).

[LMNO]

Dear Enki,

Fuck off.

Love,
LMNO