16-04-2013, 11:19 PM
22
Re: What was the scariest book, or the one that made the biggest impression?
I remember reading William Golding's Lord of the Flies when I was about 11 or 12. It was quite scary, but the main thing about it was the influence it had on me. Like most idealistic kids, I believed that there were good people and bad people and that the world was a straightforward place. Lord of the Flies made it very clear that what we call civilisation is little more than skin deep, and that it takes very little for people to degenerate into mindless savagery - a lesson that has been sadly confirmed yet again with yesterday's bomb blasts in Boston. I am reminded of the quotation by Steven Weinberg, "With or without religion, you would have good people doing good ... But for good people to do evil things, that takes religion.” I would extend that quote to say, "But for good people to do evil things, that takes religion (or any other political or cultural belief system whose adherents regard it as self-evidently true and beyond critique)."|
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