Peter Lineham: Massey University Professor Emeritus of Religion on the National Library's plan destroying religious texts

The Internal Affairs Minister's being criticised for allowing improper destruction of religious texts from the National Library.  

The Government plans to shred around half a million books which include the Bible, the Qur'an, and the Torah, to save on storage costs. 

Massey University Professor Emeritus of Religion Peter Lineham told Heather de Plessis-Allan religious texts should be offered to the relevant communities. 

He says Minister Brooke van Velden suggested they can do what they want with the books because New Zealand's secular.  

But Lineham says being secular doesn't mean being careless with other people’s beliefs. 

Lineham told du Plessis-Allan religions have strict beliefs about how texts should be handled and destroyed - if at all.  

He says only preserving New Zealand books fails to recognise our society contains —and is stemmed from— many cultures. 

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
The National Library is planning another color of its books.
This time. What's making it a bit controversial is that
quite a few of the books are key religious texts.
You're talking the Bible, the Koran, the Torah, the Book
of Mormon. They're among about half a million books being
dumped to save a million dollars a year in storage costs.
Peter Linum is a professor emeritus of religion and History
at Massi University and with us.

Speaker 2 (00:19):
Good morning, Peter, good morning, how are you.

Speaker 1 (00:22):
I'm very well, thank you. Do you mind the shredding
of the religious books?

Speaker 2 (00:27):
Well, I don't mind particularly, but my goodness, religions do mind.
You know, there are a whole set of books talking
about how properly to dispose of worn out religious texts.
And for example, Muslims who suspect that somebody has destroyed

(00:47):
a Quran are likely to kill the person for their misbehavior.
And Jews have a special part of the cemetery in
which properly you should bury the books with a set ritual.
And for the Sikhs, and it's a very remarkable story,

(01:10):
they believe that their sacred scriptures are the living leader
of the church, so you must not on any account.
Suppose of them. You know, I could go on, it's
quite a story.

Speaker 1 (01:24):
Okay, in which case should the National Library be offering
them to the religions themselves, these books and say you
can rehome them.

Speaker 2 (01:31):
Yes, I think that's essential. I mean, I am scandalized
by the whole behavior of the National Library treating our
National Library effectively as a sort was second rate library.
It doesn't need to have everything, and I think it's
essential to preserve the books anyway, but for sacred texts

(01:54):
they must be treated with great care and reverence. And
I mean the attitude of book band de Belden who
made the comment, what was it that, oh, well, this
is a secular country, so we can do what we
want to with them. Well, that's that's the source of
all the problems of tensions between religions, when we fail

(02:15):
to recognize we may be secular. That doesn't make us
careless about other people.

Speaker 1 (02:21):
Very strongly held, but just on the idea that we
need to hold every kind of book that we have currently,
I mean, it's a global world now, right, should we
not actually be specializing in New Zealand books? And if
you really really want to get your hands on something
that is available elsewhere, and your research and you travel elsewhere.

Speaker 2 (02:39):
Well, for a start, the amazing thing is over the generations.
The National Library compiled a remarkable set of books that
made us an international library. By saying that we're only
going to preserve New Zealand books, we're saying that all
that we care about is our own culture and planning
to recognize that in most cases we're a derivation culture.

(03:02):
You know, we are depended upon other things. Yes, I
quite agree that a great thing that has happened in
recent years is the scanning of texts so that they
are very readily available to the scholar and the researcher.
But there is nothing like the real book. I can
tell you. I love the Nationial Library. I just love

(03:24):
going in and drawing upon its huge resources.

Speaker 1 (03:27):
Yeah, brilliant. It's lovely to talk to you, Peter. You
look after yourself. Peter Lyne and Professor Emeritus of Religion
and History at Massive University. Incidentally, I actually think that
I may have about three of Peter's books at my
house and I don't know where they are, so I'm
not going to discuss it with him. I had to
borrow some religious texts. From him to do a bit
of study, and then I don't think I gave them

(03:48):
back anyway. Maybe he'll get in touch with me after this.
Are we really that first?

Speaker 2 (03:54):
By this?

Speaker 1 (03:55):
Come on? I mean, look, I don't want to be
I don't want to be dumping on anybody else's religion.
I'm speaking from a Christian point of view, right, But
I mean the other day one of the cousins turned
up with a kid's Bible and I looked at it
and it was tatty, and I thought, when you turn around, mate,
that's going straight in the in the bin, right, Because
I mean, I just go down the road by another
Bible if I want one. Anyway, I quite like the

(04:15):
idea of a fifty story building full of books. That's
that's quite cool. It's very modern. That seems to be
off the table now.

Speaker 2 (04:22):
Actually.

Speaker 1 (04:23):
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