Run! Books!

A bunch of conservative wags voted on a list of the 10 most harmful books ever written.

The list prompted one liberal wag to ask: why are conservatives afraid of books? Maybe he misheard them? ("Worms, Roxanne! I was afraid of worms!").

It's a valid question, on the surface. On the one hand, one should should never fear ideas, in and of themselves. Especially not Christians, who are armed with the eternal truth of the gospel. On the other hand ... check out that list. There's some scary stuff there. All the world's hateful "isms" are represented. Communism (Mao, The Communist Manifesto, Das Kapital), Nazism (Mein Kampf), feminism (The Feminine Mystique) and many flavors of atheism and humanism (pretty much the rest.)

Put all those social constructs together and you've probably accounted for about 65 or 70 million executions of innocents through the last two centuries or so. Perhaps that's a low guess: add up the deaths from Stalin (a communist), Hitler (a Nazi) and abortions (the end-result of feminism and humanist thinking) and you might well account for more than 100 million dead. However you slice it, that's pretty scary.