Online Books Available For Download The Immoral
Stephanie Dejoode
I live in Bangladesh. In my country, I don't get authentic, high quality foreign books about science, philosophy, psychology etc. Even if some bookstores sell those books, the price due to import tax is too high to afford. For this reason, it has become quite a culture for nerds like me, to download free PDF of those books from internet, read them directly or get them printed in local printing house and then read them.
Besides, by reading those books I can know more. Even I share this knowledge with people, as a result, many people come to know new facts and new writers, scientists, philosophers, psychologists etc. In this arguement, my action is benefitting not only me and my buddies but also writers and publisher indirectly by gaining fame.
So disobeying a law, in and of itself, is not immoral, it could even be immoral not to do so, if it is particularly unjust (probably not in this case). But also conversely, if the law is ethically sound the fact that it is not legally binding in one's country does not make breaking it ethical.
On whether copyright violations becoming a general practice is a good thing opinions differ, some argue that abolishing, or at least scaling back, copyright would on balance be beneficial. Your circumstances might be particularly favorable to such arguments: if we restrict the practice to individuals who have no alternative access to the books through no fault of their own the case for making it universal becomes stronger ("universal" does not exclude qualifiers, as long as they can be generally applied).
Since Kant wrote an essay titled Of the Injustice of Counterfeiting Books (1785) he may not concur. However, Kant did reject the notion of intellectual property, his defense of copyright is based on different considerations, see Pievatolo's Freedom, ownership and copyright: why does Kant reject the concept of intellectual property?:
"As most scholars, in the field of humanities, take intellectual property for granted, the representation of Kant like an intellectual property forerunner is still a dangerously mistaken commonplace. According to Kant's Architectonic of Pure Reason the philosopher is closer to a lawgiver than to an artificer, if philosophy is considered in its Weltbegriff or cosmopolitan concept (AA.03: 542.23-30). Because such a lawgiving is based upon that reason with which every human being is endowed, the laws of reason should be thought as public laws and not as individual, private creations.
How could a public law be consistently viewed as an object of private intellectual property? Kant avoids such a contradiction because his justification of authors' right does not rely on intellectual property, but on the meaning and the function of both authors and publishers in the world of the public use of reason. Therefore, Kant's theory of copyright is compatible with the Weltbegriff of philosophy."
Kant did not address poverty, etc., specifically, but given his justification of copyright in terms of public use of reason one can imagine a Kantian defense of the practice when it is a precondition for including individuals into this use. One could perhaps even invoke Kant's "formula of humanity", a second formulation of the categorical imperative:
"It's Perfectly Normal" is described as a children's book centered around puberty and sexual health, and Amanchukwu claims it is available in ACS libraries. ACS's online library catalog suggests that at least one copy of the book can be found in its middle school.
Amanchukwu displayed several pages during Monday's meeting, describing depictions of "pornographic images," including various couples "having sex." He claims each image can be found in "It's Perfectly Normal."
Amanchukwu attempted to read a passage allegedly from "It's Perfectly Normal," which seemingly describes aspects of sexual intercourse to readers. However, an ACS school board member quickly asked him to stop, prompting Amanchukwu to question why the contents are appropriate for "children" but not for "a school board meeting."
No school board members directly responded to Amanchukwu's concerns. ACS school board chair George Sieburg ultimately asked the pastor to leave by telling him that his "time is up," to which Amanchukwu responded "that makes two of us."
With that out of the way, the best place to buy print books is from your favorite local bookstore or from Bookshop, an online service that supports independent bookstores all across the US. Through Bookshop, you can either choose a particular bookstore to receive the full profit from your order or you can contribute your profit to a general pool that gets distributed evenly to independent bookstores. Supporting indie bookstores is reason enough to buy books from them, but authors will sometimes offer their own incentive for preordering from an indie bookstore, such as a signed postcard or an art print. Need a suggestion of an indie bookstore to support? Here are a few that I love!
Our first two out of the three passages both use our focus word, translated "sodomites" above, but the second passage in 1 Corinthians adds a second word, so I decided to swap the book order for the purposes of this essay. We will build on the word study in the next section.
As you've seen, I've spent a lot of time in cross-referencing studies for our first three passages in the Tanakh. I hope you'll agree that it was helpful to pull together a variety of references for each passage to help us get at the meaning of the instructions.
Unfortunately, we simply cannot do that in the Bible for our three New Testament passages. There are no other places where the same words are used, or other sections that refer back to them. We are left with three brief sets of verses that seem to stand alone.
Now, you may not accept my reading proposals for the Tanakh at this time. However, I'd like to say that for myself the prohibition foundation against all homosexual behavior does not seem as concrete as we might have assumed from a surface-level reading.
While women are banned from bestiality there doesn't seem to be any concern over them entering into lesbian relationships. We don't know if this is because it didn't happen at the time, or the men writing down the codes didn't know it was happening, or if it just wasn't a concern because they didn't see this as missing an opportunity for procreation (which was a big deal at the time). Certainly prostitution in idolatry was a concern for both genders.
While the concern about idolatrous rituals could be carried forward to our third New Testament passage, what we encounter in the first two passages may come from Jewish exposure to a whole new world of vice and immorality.
As we saw discussed briefly in our first Leviticus passage, rules of morality often are in response to the surrounding environment. Israel was commanded to be set apart from the practices of Canaanite idolatry, and the acts of violence common to the time.
From the 3rd century BCE, a massive cultural exchange with Greece was started. The Jews began to be exposed to Greek culture, philosophy and religion, while also translating the Tanakh from Hebrew and Aramaic into Greek. During this period the Greek translation, known as the Septuagint, became a primary source for many, and additional writings which we now know as the Apocrypha were added. Judaism expanded out dramatically, putting synagogues in far off regions and develop- ing significant new centers of learning and study in locations like Alexandria in Egypt.
By the time of Christ, Aramaic was the language spoken locally in Judea, but Greek was the international language. Not only was Paul writing in Greek, which he would have grown up with as a Hellenized Jew and Roman citizen, but he was writing to those who were saturated in Greek and Roman culture whether they were ethnically Jewish or Gentile. The cultural assumptions and environments were vastly different from those in Genesis and Leviticus.
The second option was for men to seek sex with male youth either in brothels or in their own households as slaves. In these cases there was quite clearly no choice for the slave boy (at least the ermenos had a choice to begin with). Some men were so taken with these boys that they would be castrated to preserve their more feminine appearance longer. The emperor Nero is famous for doing so with a slave named Sporus around this time period, and then marrying him in an elaborate ceremony.
Finally, we should not forget that we are now looking at a completely new form of literature compared to the rest of the canon. Unlike the various histories, poetry, laws, and narratives, Paul is writing letters.
The most important thing to know for our current topic is that the letter was originally intended for those living in the middle of Greco-Roman culture, and that they might understand various references and terms from their context in ways that we may not today.
Before we discuss the likely origin, I would like to emphasize that much of the conservative doctrine against homosexuality is based directly on this single word on which contemporary scholars, both liberal and conservative, agree we can never be absolutely sure what it meant when Paul wrote it down.
The most common conservative argument for the derivation of the word is the hypothesis that Paul created it based on the early Greek translation from Hebrew of Leviticus 18:22 found in the Septuagint:
Another suggestion is that the root word choices come from this verse, but are used to directly translate the 1st century rabbinic term "mishkav zakur", meaning "lying with a male", into Greek. The general connotation is the same as with the first suggestion, except that it may be a broader concept than a specific reference to the one command in the Law.
There is general, though not universal, agreement that some form of male-with-male sex is being condemned in the context. The next question is, why did Paul make up a word when he had plenty to pick from in existing Greek and Roman vocabulary?
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