this is good, maybe you could write one about sexuality, i would like to see, becasue i found both of these very interesting,

I love your style. This was very well written. I don't know if it's just me but doesn't THE POWER OF PRAYER sound like it's giving instructions to something that should come naturally? I don't know, being an atheist, much on the subject, and i also haven't read the book, so i can't rightfully accuse the book of anything. This was a good essay, i liked it. Keep writing.

Hey! Theres another one! I did that same thing in church for a year. Then we switched churches and I stopped going altogether...
*g* Yay, I'm not alone!

Heh, you sound like me in old book rooms. I just love to look at really old books and be amused at what and how people thought in the time that they were written. I suppose, too, to some extent, I love them not only for the views that they express, which today would be considered silly, but how they show what's changed...oh I could go on and on...but I won't, cause this is just a review...so...

Disregarding my views on God, and the fact that all forms of psudo-science is sheer quackery, books are important, but not scared. Book burning is backward, closed minded and disrespectful, but it's not evil. This eassy is inconclusive. The books in the chuch are clearly like that because the chruch can't afford to keep them any other way.

The only books I would see as "sacred" are those which cannot be replaced: The works of Leonard Da Vinci; The Book of Kells, ect. All other books, including the bible, are not.

I was lucky enough to grow up with books: every branch of my family had literally thousands of the things, and they were *read*. I'm hugely grateful that I was granted such a boon in my childhood. I find it almost impossible to comprehend when someone says: "I don't read books". How do they manage that, I wonder to myself?

So of course your comments strike a chord. I've "liberated" a few books destined for the rubbish tip myself in my time. I'm not a very tidy person - there are piles of books all over my house - but... *but*... they're loved. Battered they may be, but maltreated? No.

On a completely different note, what you said about "The Compact Guide to the Christian Life" intrigued me. To be completely honest, I would tell an author of that sort that I'd probably prefer hell, seeing as (by their token) I and pretty much everyone I know would be there. Hell is other people, they say: well, maybe that wouldn't be so bad. As it happens, I'm an atheist, so it's rather academic to me, but all faiths (and non-faiths) have their ridiculous charlatans.