Martin Luther King, Jr. once said, “The ultimate tragedy is not the oppression and cruelty by the bad people but the silence over that by the good people.”
Along this same line of thinking, I would like to pose the following: the ultimate danger is not in the misinformation and the disinformation offered by the bad people or the uneducated, but it is the allowance of censorship in a free society by the people, good and bad, that will be the greatest danger to free thought and individual liberty.
Heinrich Heine said, "Where they have burned books, they will end in burning human beings."
Books are written from the ideas of their authors. Some ideas need work. Some ideas need critical feedback. Some ideas inspire and enlighten. Some ideas educate. Some ideas offer hope. All ideas come from individual minds. All individuals learn how to think through sharing their ideas.
Jordan Peterson has said, "In order to be able to think you have to risk being offensive." It is true that people are offended by ideas that differ from their own. New ideas, seemingly incorrect or misleading ideas, ideas that go against our established way of thinking can agitate the mind. But this exchange of ideas is a healthy thing for humanity. Peterson also said, “We outsource the problem of sanity. People remain mentally healthy not merely because of the integrity of their own minds, but because they are constantly being reminded how to think, act, and speak by those around them.” And how do we communicate with those around us today? Through our growing social media options and technology.
Social media and technology is where we share our modern writings, books, digital letters, and journals through a massive interconnected global net of individual minds. What will happen to those independent ideas deemed as misinformation and disinformation after those posts have been "burned" through technological censorship of the offended?
The American press during the 1790s played a role analogous to that of today’s electronic media, which, like today, was used as a vehicle to attack the principles and policies of the opposing political parties of the period. Since the dawn of a literate public actively engaged in government, politicians have both supported and cursed the effects of the press on the political process. The rapidly growing media of the late eighteenth century was seen as a necessary evil that could serve or destroy the evolution of the new federal government.
https://humblymybrain.substack.com/p/the-press-as-a-weapon-how-1790s-newspapers
The Old Testament’s first mention of polygamy appears not among the righteous, but in the violent lineage of Cain, through his descendant Lamech, who “took unto him two wives,” Adah and Zillah (Genesis 4:19). In the same brief passage, Lamech boasts to those wives of having slain two men—one “to my wounding,” and a young man “to my hurt”—while daring any avenger to face a vengeance “seventy and sevenfold” (Genesis 4:23-24). The canonical account leaves the circumstances of these killings ambiguous: accident, self-defense, or cold-blooded murder? Scripture alone offers no clarity. Yet when apocryphal witnesses are consulted, the portrait darkens dramatically, revealing Lamech not as a flawed but sympathetic figure, but as the Bible’s inaugural polygamist whose life bears only the rotten fruit of murder, secret oaths with Satan, and divine curse—fruit that exposes plural marriage’s origin as profoundly corrupt from its very root.
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