It’s not exceedingly rare for me to see posters for Jesus this and Bible that around town on telephone poles, or an announcement for a Bible-study group on one of the bulletin boards at my college campus. I always have an urge to deface them or take them down.
On several occasions I’ve acted on this and written witty cynicisms (at least, in my mind they were, and I’ve long since forgotten the details) on posters, and recently I took a “fill out and send in this card for a free Bible” from a bulletin board, planning to fill it out with bogus and incendiary information like “Satan, 666 Fuckoff Lane, Hell” but gave it up and tossed the thing when I realized they wanted me to provide a stamp. Never just taken one down though.
Do you ever get this urge and have you acted on it?
Atheist checkin in: no. I see that behavior as repugnant and immature, the kind of thing I would expect of a religious zealot to do to the materials of a competing religion. I think the kind of person who would do that is just as unbalanced as any other religious fanatic.
No. Sometimes I see things that make me cringe, typically advertisements from the denomination I grew up in, but I’d far prefer to talk to people about why they’re not what they seem rather than just wantonly, cravenly destroying what isn’t mine.
Posters and such don’t bother me…too much. But when we have these singning (badly) and preaching christians with sound systems in the middle of the city (who gives them permits!!) I always feel the need to say something really anti religious to the person I’m talking with at that moment; also when they offer me flyers I often feel the need to say something in the line of: I’m too old for fairy tales or: I’m the anti christ (dependning on my mood before it was darkened by their persistent religious nagging). Often I just walk past them without acknoledging them, but sometimes I just say what I think.
However, if I check in to a hotel and find a bible in the drawer, I remove it and dispose of it in the trash, because in my opinion that’s exactly where it belongs. I consider it to be outmoded, superstitious, self-contradicting nonsense that is responsible for blighting many minds and many lives, including my own (the early part of it). It is a book that preaches hatred, violence and division, and advances the view that one group of people are arbitrarily superior to another. It is a book cited time and time again by those who want an excuse to hate, persecute or abuse others. I don’t see why I should tolerate having hate literature in my room, and I treat it the same way I would if I found a piece of white supremacist literature.
This point (about bibles in rooms) has been discussed on the boards before now, and I know that a majority of people here disagree with me, and perhaps disagree very strongly (not all of them christians by any means). It remains my point of view.
I’m not fanatically religious, but I’m really dismayed by the intolerance of some posters on this board. Congratulations to you if you’re proud of yourself.
When I was about 13, in an act of childish rebellion, I went through all of the Bibles in my Religious Education class with a pen and in each one changed the Book of Job into the Book of Jobbie (Jobbie being a Scottish slang term that a child might use to refer to a piece of excrement).
I know it’s neither big nor clever, but to this day, I still can’t resist the urge to do it to hotel room Bibles.
I throw out any religious literature that is given to me, but I leave it alone if nobody is giving it to me. I don’t throw out or deface things that aren’t mine. That includes things I find repugnant, like white supremacist literature.
The closest I’ve come to actually doing anything like this happened in college. I was writing a paper about the Civil Rights movement, and had checked out a book with some stuff by Martin Luther King Jr in it. Someone who had checked out the book before I did had written some negative comment about his nonviolent methods in the book. I scratched out their comment with a pen. I felt justified in doing that, because they had had no right to write in the book in the first place. People do have the right to put up flyers advertising group meetings (or whatever), even if the group supports a cause I find repellent, so I don’t take down or deface their flyers.
I have to admit I have the same gut reaction to bibles in hotels as ianzin and others do (in principle I mean-I don’t think I’ve actually stayed in a hotel room with a bible). Just cause I was curious I did some googling, and came up with this: http://www.removethatbible.com/
Not exactly the petition of the century, with pathetically few signatures, but I put my name down.
Honestly though, how many thinking people have been converted by one night of sleep in a room that happened to have a bible in it? It’s not exactly the most persuasive book ever, and that’s assuming anyone ever cracks it open. No, I think moldy isolation and eventual disintegration in the corner of a dusty bottom drawer, forgotten and ignored, is exactly the fate the bible deserves.
I have the urge when it’s filthy or badly spelled or ugly. In my old neighborhood someone used to put up these filthy hand-lettered signs that were always spelled correctly. Come on, how is that better than vandalism? It pisses me off, really. Those I want to take down - it’s just embarrassing. At least make an effort and make your sign pretty.
I’ve had that thought on lots of stuff including religious. The only time I did so was to tear off a one page hate notice Going on about niggers, goops, Satan and the such. If you wrote it you can chew me out, but I have to say you need to seek mental help.
I think that if someone can say they’ve never wanted to remove religious material they live in a one sect town, because the other sects put up conflicting stuff. Your first reaction is that’s wrong, it needs to come down.