Because of your blocking efforts you’ve Empowered Decency by blocking the controversial book series The Golden Compass. Thanks for making a difference in what we sell, and how you shop.Excerpt from the release. Full press release is here.
“Abunga.com is so dedicated to providing a family-friendly environment to shop for books online, it even lets customers vote on books to ban. That happened recently with the children’s fantasy novel “The Golden Compass.” The book, which was the basis for the movie of same name released in December, received criticism from religious groups for its perceived anti-Catholic and atheistic themes.
“The Golden Compass’” was our most frequently blocked book in December,” says Abunga.com CEO Adam Slack. “We feel compelled to honor the wishes of our community.”
Oh, and there are a few people over at this blog that have seen the release and aren’t very happy that we’ve decided not to sell the book, or that we exist as an alternative. Check it out!
-Gavin
gbaker
saslack
leemartin
kkarel
dnorman
rnoe
brittanydavidson
What does blocking a book written by an atheist have to do with decency? “Empowering Decency” is a nice sounding slogan, but this just seems more like enforcing group think.
This whole concept is just very negative. Instead of saying “these are books we like”, your whole focus seems to be on ferreting out the books you hate so you can issue press releases proudly proclaiming your disapproval. This isn’t building anything up in a positive way, this is tearing things down. If you don’t like the writing of Philip Pullman, why even mention him? (I mean, apart from cynically capitalizing on his movie to get publicity.)
Amateurs. Real censors BURN books.
Your statements smack of pride. Pride is one of the seven deadly sins - actually considered to be the most deadly and the one out of which the other deadly sins arise.
“Pride goeth before destruction and a haughty spirit before a fall.” Proverbs 16:18
Strange that a fantasy book is blocked just because it is written by an atheist while there are still books available that advocate genocide, daughters sleeping with their father, polygamy, torture, slavery …
Now if those books got banned you might be right in claiming to be “a family-friendly environment”
The simple fact that you have banned a book written by an atheist and proclaimed it as some for of good thing really doesn’t speak well of your business and I am a Christian.
Your readers can’t all be that close minded.
Lets just be real clear here. Pullman wrote a story in which there may or may not be a god, where souls are real, where a great evil has stolen nearly **all** of the power of the being that claims to be God, and is trying to *purify* the world by ripping people’s souls from their bodies, so they are nothing but obedient, nearly mindless, safe, and 100% obedient zombies. A little girl, without knowing her destiny, goes on a quest against this great evil monster (which is very nearly an analog to the devil) and defeats it, using a device that only tells her the truth, and in the end, eventually her falling in love. Meanwhile, the corrupt Magesterium, who are paranoid about fee will, believe that the world would be better without it, and have fallen for the lies of the devil, try to stop and destroy her, and anyone else that helps her.
If it wasn’t written by a fracking atheist, you people would have just claim it was some “other” church, or the inquisition, or some other group, and that your church *isn’t* like that. But it was, so lots of morons panicked over what they **thought** it said, without ever reading it, your users followed them of the cliff like sheep, because its sooooo much easier to let some authority figure tell you what to think that read them yourself and form your own opinions, and they came here, where they voted to ban it, likely without so much as reading the back cover, never mind anything else.
This is dishonest, foolish, stupid, ignorant and **evil**. You are the sort of people that will stand around insisting that something you don’t want to hear isn’t true, until it kills half of you, then blame to people that spent years telling you about the problem for not telling you sooner, when the *only* reason you didn’t know is because you refused to read a bunch of books that you thought where “not family friendly”. I have no sympathy what so ever for you fools. Wallow in your ignorance, ban random books that are harmless, and leave things like Nietzsche, which rip religion and the sort of value of ignorance held here to shreds, on the list as “acceptable”. Fail, continuously to take the age old advice that, “A fool should say nothing, lest he open his mouth and remove all doubt.” I could care less. You are a drop in the bucket when it comes to the kind of ignorant foolishness people advocate and surround themselves with in this world (and a very small drop at that). But, you where good for a long laugh. Tomorrow, you won’t even be worth that.
Lee:
Thanks for your letter.
I admit that my immediate reaction upon reading about Abunga’s, to me, distasteful, indecent book burnings, the first thing I did was sign on the Abunga site and try to screw it up by blocking a few hundred insidious books myself like The Bible, The Quran, anything with the Catholic in it, bestsellers, children’s comics, etc. However that was clearly inappropriate: in a free society, people are able to voluntarily gather and do whatever they want within the bounds of law and shouldn’t be subject to disruption or harassment.
I can’t wish you well since I disagree morally with your choices but I’ll certainly leave you alone. If anyone asks me about it, I’ll ask them to leave you alone also.
With my apologies,
Thank you for this service, Abunga! You have no idea (well, perhaps you did!) how hard it is to find a source like this. I know where I will be buying my books in the future!
Just imagine, now people can purchase books without being exposed to new ideas or learning anything! Isn’t that what my minister said? Books are simply echo chambers for things we already know.
Perhaps our ignorance and lack of exposure to opposing thought will bring about another era of religious control — like the Dark Ages! We can only hope, can’t we?
Yours truly,
True Christian
Be careful, Stephen Marney, your integrity, courtesy and decency contradict the “evil atheist/secularist/liberal” stereotype Abunga is promoting. You might hurt their brains.
“Because of your blocking efforts you’ve Empowered Decency by blocking the controversial book series The Golden Compass ”
The only thing being empowered here is ignorance:
1. _The Golden Compass_ is the title of a single book, not a series. The trilogy of which it forms the first part is called _His Dark Materials_. Anyone proposing to censor a work of literature had better know at the very least how the work is identified and organized.
2. You are still selling the remaining two books of the aforementioned trilogy. Bear in mind that the first book (_Compass_), the one you have banned, is universally considered by those familiar with the books to be the LEAST controversial of the three. What can we conclude from this? Answer: far from being throughtful informed people, your customers are pathetic ignoramuses who have been incited into frantic mob action by some rumor they heard from a chain e-mail. If they were genuinely disturbed by the supposedly “antireligious” content of _His Dark Materials_, as opposed to being merely paranoid freaks, they would have banned the third book, not the first.
3. Criticism of religion does NOT constitute a violation of decency. (Read the last sentence again.) Anyone who says it does is a cretinous bigot and ought to be shunned.
4. “Family-friendly”: Do the moronic mobs who patronize your store really think that _The Golden Compass_ is inappropriate reading material for the children of their atheist neighbors? (Oh, that’s right, I almost forgot — atheists are immoral people who wouldn’t care if their children were exposed to drugs and pornography! So no wonder they let their kids read Pullman — six of one, half a dozen of the other!)
5. Frankly, I don’t know which is worse: that you allowed a magnificent, award-winning book like _The Golden Compass_ to be censored by a bunch of dunderheads, or that you issued a press release celebrating this fact.
I predict that you won’t stay in business long. But if you do, it will only be a sad commentary on the sorry state of certain backward segments of our society.
You shouldn’t have banned that book it’s a timeless classic! And you got the title wrong it’ss called Northern Lights not Golden Compass.
So I just don’t get it. If people disagree with a book, why can’t they just not buy it? Or if even the sight of the book offends their delicate sensibilities, why not just allow them to block it from their own search results? Why ban anyone from buying it because the community doesn’t like it? You abunga folks are pro-censorship and pro-groupthink is, I guess, the answer. It’s a crying shame.
It’s funny how the book was published 13 years ago in 2005…yet no one became outraged about it until a (gasp!) MOVIE was suddenly available to the public…
Good move Abunga.
Do you sell Farenheit 451?
The Bible has some horrific scenes of torture, incest and murder. You should block it.
Don’t have a cow man
What a wonderful idea to ban certain books based on what the majority feels is a moral and ethical viewpoint. Imagine how many of our modern classics would have been banned if the majority where allowed to ban books during segregation. Don’t forget that at a certain time in history, the majority of people supported slavery, “moral” nazi leadership, “moral” Stalinist rule, “moral” Crusades, a “moral inquisition”, a “moral” jihad, a “moral” massacre of the non-believers.
To clarify, in case the sarcasm went over your heads, censorship by majority is stupid and completely wrong. The majority, throughout history have proven to be wrong during various times. In this instance, the belief in your supreme deity who will destroy other’s is completely wrong as well. If you want to do your children a favor, how about educating them with the tools of science to investigate the world they live in. Empower them to grow and understand the universe without indoctrinating them into some ancient belief system that continues to thrust itself against the wall of progress. Everything your religious beliefs have been based on have slowly dissolved because society is changing and progressing towards a greater understanding of our world. As our understaning grows, your religious views shrink. All you can fall back on is your false sence of faith, when evidence, progress, reasoning, a growing mountain of scientific proof that your archaic beliefs are just a product of fantasy and gullibility of simpler times. With all the tools we have now to investigate our world, you are a dying breed, it may take decades, perhaps centuries, but as always, progress will trump your misguided belief structure.
Science is not your enemy, but your educational levels and gullibilities sure are.
Interesting. A business model based on people making it so that others can’t buy stuff at your store. If this store survives it surely will be God’s will! If I were to have a God-friendly store, I just wouldn’t stock stuff that I don’t like, and that would be the end of it. Unless, this is all a lot of hype to try to sell stuff to people that don;t like to think too much… hey, brilliant!