By the time you read this, an extremist Christian minister in Florida may or may not have burned copies of the Koran. He is far from the first, and he won\u2019t be the last, to try to kill a book. Censorship and book burnings are an ugly, but persistent, aspect of world history.<\/p>\n

Excuses for banning and\/or barbecuing books have included sexual and socially disturbing content. This week\u2019s threatened Koran burning, though, is about politics and religion [and it\u2019s getting mighty hard to separate the two]. What other books have been banned, burned or censored for so-called religious reasons? The list is long, and no religion can claim innocence. Here\u2019s a sampling, culled\u2014and freely paraphrased\u2014from 100 Banned Books: Censorship Histories of World Literature<\/a>. <\/em><\/p>\n

Galileo Galilei, Italy, 1632<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n

As you may remember, Galileo was the professor of mathematics at the University of Pisa who looked at the sky through a refracting telescope that he designed, and concluded that, 50 years earlier, Copernicus had been right: We live in a sun-centered universe.<\/p>\n

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