Well, it's the last day of
Banned Books Week for this year, and accordingly, there's something fitting to post:
The Satanic Children's Big Book of Activities is a children's activity book filled with with the usual sorts of cutesy colourable quizzes that you might expect, free courtesy of The Satanic Temple, who also make this available in paper copies in their gift shop, by the way.
As for why they made this in the first place, well, it was kind of to protest the attempting censoring of atheist literature while still allowing Bibles and other religious materials to be distributed in public schools in a Florida district.
When the ruling finally came out that if the religious stuff could be passed out in a publicly-funded place, then the atheist stuff had to have equal opportunity, The Satanic Temple came up with this fun colouring activity book for the kiddies on the reasoning that:
Quote:
The spokesman for the Satanic Temple, Lucien Greaves, explained that his organization “would never seek to establish a precedent of disseminating our religious materials in public schools because we believe our constitutional values are better served by respecting a strong separation of Church and State.”
“However,” he continued, “if a public school board is going to allow religious pamphlets and full Bibles to be distributed to students — as is the case in Orange County, Florida — we think the responsible thing to do is to ensure that these students are given access to a variety of differing religious opinions, as opposed to standing idly by while one religious voice dominates the discourse and delivers propaganda to youth.”
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Currently free directly from @
The Satanic Temple's website (DRM-free PDF available worldwide). About a 10 meg file, IIRC.
Here's The Satanic Temple's
official press release for the situation, and the
ONTD Political blogpost where* I found this.
Just as a reminder, if you'd like to discuss the reasons for the creation and distribution of this book with your fellow MR members, we've a dedicated
Politics & Religion forum just for doing that, which you can join via the
instructions found in this thread here, if you're interested.
If you just want to talk about the difficulty of the Word Jumble or other of the activities found inside, that should still be a thread-safe discussion here.
And this has been the selected 3rd (non-repeat) free ebook thread of the day.
Because freedom of speech applied equally to all (allowing for blocking slander and hate speech and shouting FIRE in crowded theatres and all), and freedom of (and from) religion (regardless of which particular one you choose to practice or not), and the separation of Church and State are important, even when one lives in a country when they're not quite phrased in those terms.
Enjoy!
Description
(There's no actual blurb provided for this in the gift shop, but it contains a Spot the Differences, a Dot-to-Dot, a Word Jumble, a Word Search, a Maze, and all the pages can be coloured.)
* Also, if you're wondering about the Baphomet statue referenced in the article, here's
two more ONTD Political blogposts about it.
I especially like the bit about making a mould of it in case of vandalism, "so they can pop these things out like evil, terribly expensive action figures whenever they need a new one".
