John Milton Areopagitica Sparknotes

In this week's reading "Areopagitica" by John Milton he writes a formal protest against prior censorship. In June of the year 1643, English Parliament passed a law known as the Licensing Order which stated that all books were required to be approved by an official censor before they could be published. A little over a year later is when Milton wrote Areopagitica to try to repeal the law. He was not successful in his efforts; however, this piece of literature stood as an inspiration for the right and free press and still continues to serve the same purpose today. He starts of his paper by praising Parliament for defending liberty in the past. He then continues by giving a history of censorship and pointing out that the right of freedom of press was valued greatly in ancient Rome and Greece. He then points out problems with the argument that censorship does society a service by destroying bad books. We live in a world where good and evil mingle with one another and people have a hard time discerning the difference between the two. When people read books,
I think it is good to teach people how to tell the difference between good and bad but we can't use censorship to take away people's right to freedom of press. One problem with eliminating the opportunity for people to seek truth and lies in literature, in movies, on the internet, etc. is when people begin to do things that may be "bad" in the eyes of an official censor is that now these people might not know how to handle being in the presence of bad influences. One thing that I think is interesting is that Milton points out that ideas and information are spread in more ways than just by books. This means that if we really want to follow the idea of censorship then we would need to censor all things including songs, dancing, clothing, jokes, and pretty much everything that can spread some sort of idea to other