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Let's bring science into it.
Okay, so there's this guy in Australia who decided to smoke hand-rolled cigarettes using pages from the Quran and the Bible as rolling papers. (link yoinked from ![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
tmofee)
This, of course, prompted umbrage from various religious leaders saying it was a horrible thing to do this to "two of the holiest books in the world".
Now, I disagree.
I'm not saying you should use pages of the Bible/Quran/tenets of the Flying Spaghetti Monster as rolling papers. But I'm not saying it because, well, the inks and bleaches and whatnot on the printed pages might fuck up the taste of your cigarettes.
What I mainly disagree with is that the pages from the Bible and Quran that were used were two of the holiest books. It's more accurate to say that they are copies of the modern translations of two of the holiest books.
By now, you're probably wondering where science comes into this.
Well, it stands to reason (ha ha, reason and religion...) that just any old copy of just any old book is NOT holy. No one, save perhaps an introverted grammar professor, would get upset if you used a page of the OED as a rolling paper. Likewise with a page out of, say, a random work of fiction.
But the same printing processes are used to make Bibles and oh, copies of Harry Potter books. Wood is pulped and processed to make paper, chemicals and dyes are combined to make inks. Inks are applied to paper in a highly automated process, the resulting pages are cut, bound, boxed up and shipped to bookstores.
So, we must ask as men of science, where does the holy come in? Is there some special blessed bleach used on the paper specifically for Bibles? Does a priest bless the ink? Are the people who run the machines sanctioned by Holy Mother Church?
No? Hrm.
More research is obviously required.
tmofee)This, of course, prompted umbrage from various religious leaders saying it was a horrible thing to do this to "two of the holiest books in the world".
Now, I disagree.
I'm not saying you should use pages of the Bible/Quran/tenets of the Flying Spaghetti Monster as rolling papers. But I'm not saying it because, well, the inks and bleaches and whatnot on the printed pages might fuck up the taste of your cigarettes.
What I mainly disagree with is that the pages from the Bible and Quran that were used were two of the holiest books. It's more accurate to say that they are copies of the modern translations of two of the holiest books.
By now, you're probably wondering where science comes into this.
Well, it stands to reason (ha ha, reason and religion...) that just any old copy of just any old book is NOT holy. No one, save perhaps an introverted grammar professor, would get upset if you used a page of the OED as a rolling paper. Likewise with a page out of, say, a random work of fiction.
But the same printing processes are used to make Bibles and oh, copies of Harry Potter books. Wood is pulped and processed to make paper, chemicals and dyes are combined to make inks. Inks are applied to paper in a highly automated process, the resulting pages are cut, bound, boxed up and shipped to bookstores.
So, we must ask as men of science, where does the holy come in? Is there some special blessed bleach used on the paper specifically for Bibles? Does a priest bless the ink? Are the people who run the machines sanctioned by Holy Mother Church?
No? Hrm.
More research is obviously required.
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Is it like Diskworld, where if you make a holy book with one set of type, and then break it up and make a cookbook, some of the holy leaks over?
Many of the words themselves aren't particularly holy. The word "the" appears several times in the bible. In fact, the first person who did a concordance of the bible actually went insane from it, which would sort of argue against any particular holiness of the words themselves. Well, unless we equate the bible with the Necronomicon.
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With, what, 80% of people believing in some sort of deity, who are the sane? those entertaining spiritual belief or those that don't?