If they leave a turd in the toilet, I’m still allowed to flush it. Right?
Yah, because in a hotel room, Reason forbid you just leave it be in case whoever rents the room tomorrow might have a less bigoted view than yours.
May I ask… in what sense are you using ‘have to’ here? Does it pertain to obligation, duty, contract, compulsion… or what? I want to understand what you meant by this.
Has anyone ever put stickers like these in Gideon bibles? Perhaps a better “solution” to the Gideon bible problem than just trashing them, considering that the bible is just going to be replaced anyway. And it might just make someone think.
First of all, the Bible will be replaced for the next guest, so that’s a non-starter. The next guest is deprived of nothing.
Secondly, why does it make somebody a “bigot” to dispose of trash they did not ask to be abandoned in their room?
By the way, if you ever rent a room, and want a Bible and find there’s not one in the drawer, it’s a housekeeping oversight. Just call the desk and they’ll bring one to your room.
By the same logic, you can steal the towels too. After all, they were abandoned in your hotel room. Likewise the glassware, sheets, and TV.
Regards,
Shodan
No, the towels belong to the hotel. The Bibles do not. They are put in the rooms with the hotel’s permission (even assistance), but they are not hotel property. As I keep saying, they are more akin to the take out menus left on top of the TV set than to the towels and soaps.
Then you are contradicting yourself. Why did you mention their “intention” at all?
Boo hoo. Cry me a river.
All you have do do is ignore the thing - I manage to do that difficult feat each and every time I stay in a hotel room.
If someone goes into a public space to deliberately destroy them, then yes. If they throw stuff out that is mailed to their house, then no.
Pretty simple distinction.
As I said before, try going into a restaurant and taking all of their “free” menus and destroying them where the proprieter can see you do it.
Obviously, throwing out a menu you have picked up is pretty de minimus.
The persons providing the free stuff and the hotel servers whose time you have egregiously wasted in replacing it.
Not getting why you don’t understand this. Suspecting willful blindness to the obvious.
No. If you are asserting I said that the stuff is “holy” please prove it.
There is no difference between “treasuring something as holy and sacred” and “not pointlessly destroying it”, according to you?
Aren’t you rather egregiously excluding what the vast majority of people in fact do - namely, ignore the thing if they have no interest in it?
Maybe with some “argument”.
Seems to me that your fallacy is supposing that pizza ads have no value whatsoever (rather than merely a very small value). The reality is that no-one cares if you throw out a single pizza ad, because its value is so small.
Throw out hundreds or thousands of ads, and the jerkishness of deliberately and pointlessly destroying them becomes clear.
You keep making (in my opinion) lousy analogies because you want to insist that this is the same situation as someone mailing stuff to your house - but it isn’t.
No-one is asking you to “treasure [bibles] forever”, but merely to refrain from pointlessly destroying them.
Done repeatedly.
This isn’t intended as a direct “analogy” to the situation under discussion, but merely to point out (as it does not appear obvious to you) that there are some acts that are not “illegal” or violative of any “rights” but which are nevertheless considered bad behaviour.
No, a hotel room is not analogous to your house.
One fact alone should suffice to demonstrate the absurdity of that position, and it is one you have been harping on repeatedly: that if someone mails something to your house, you must either throw it out or “treasure” it; if there is something lurking in a drawer of your hotel room, all you must do is NOTHING and you never have to see it again.
Sigh. A person can, very easily, be a jerk “with [their] own legal property”.
Yes there is. “Don’t be a jerk”.
The fact it is not written into a law or contract does not mean it doesn’t exist.
I’m not seeing what is so very significant about the distinction you are making. You rent a hotel’s services, including the common areas.
In any event, your whole argument appears tio be predicated on some odd legalism. There are no “terms” or “conditions” here, no contract at all - just behaving like a jerk (or not), which is if you like a matter of equity and not law.
What in the world is the difference between something in a common area and something in your particular room? Seems to me that bibles left out in the lobby are as much “abandoned” for the use of guests as ones left in your particular room.
And sure, a hotel typically leaves tons of stuff “in your room” for your consumption - shower caps, toilet paper, little bottles of shower gel, towels, whatever. Are you of the opinion that because it is “in your room” for your use you can cheerfully flush it all down the toilet and order more, if some third party pays for it?
Again, probably legally you can - never mind that you are inconveniencing the staff who has to keep replacing stuff you destroy for no reason - but you would be acting like a jerk, which is the point.
I have some questions for ianzin and others who would take or throw away the Bible. Mein Kampf has already been mentioned. Would you take or throw away the Koran? The Communist Manifesto? Quotations from Chairman Mao?
I’d like to see some UK bus ads say “There probably is no Allah.” But I know I won’t.
Let’s just simplify. A rented room is a private space, not a public one. A lobby is a public space (or at least a communal space). What’s abandoned in your private space is yours to do with as you please. It’s not analogous to going into the common space and taking something because you are not renting the exclusive use of the common space.
Why do you think that would matter?
They already do say that. “God” and “Allah” are the same thing. Saying God does not exist is the same as saying Allah doesn’t exist.
The hotel isn’t paying for the Bibles and the take-out menus in your room. They are only letting other interests pit advertizing spam in your room without your permission. What part of “the Bibles are not hotel property” do you not understand?
Considering the kinds of nastiness the Bible contains, that’s not a very defensible position. I’m sure that there are those who think that Mein Kampf isn’t evil either.
What part of “if some third party pays for it” did you fail to comprehend?
So, the work you put the hotel staff through in re-stocking stuff you decide to toss out for no reason ‘doesn’t count’ because it isn’t hotel property they are restocking?
If you toss garbage on the floor for no reason, it doesn’t inconvenience other guests because the hotel staff clean it up; if you toss out bilbles it doesn’t inconvenience other guests because (as you have repeatedly noted) the hotel will restock it.
In both cases, it is “your room”, and does not involve “hotel property”, but you are putting the hotel to trouble for essentially nothing.
All you’re left with is gasping about the work it takes for housekeeping to put another Bible in the drawer? That’s pretty weak.
I do not agree with this overly-elaborate “rule”. For one, I do not see any reason to treat free stuff left out for guests in the lobby any differently from free stuff left out for guests in the room, as if one was a totally different species of property than the other.
Seems a simpler one is as follows: free stuff left out for guests in general ought to be used “in good faith” - that is, more or less for the intended purpose; with the common sense notion that a mere paper flier isn’t worth much of anything and can be made into the occasional paper airplane. 
Same as tossing litter on the floor. Takes only a second for house staff to clean up. Does that make it okay?
I never claimed it was a major bit of jerkishness. It is more akin to littering. Multiply it by thousands of guests and it becomes major.
I would not have any response to them because I don’t know anything much about their contents, or what these specific texts preach. Sure, I can make an educated guess about the contents, and I’ve heard references to these books all my life like anyone else, but in all honesty I know very little about them.
I am very familiar with the bible and its contents, and the things that it preaches, which is why I consider it to be hate-filled propaganda and feel it belongs in the garbage.
That’s what bugs me about it. Throwing it away is giving the cleaning staff more work to do, and that doesn’t seem right just to take a little tiny stand that isn’t going to be known about or matter to anyone. I mean, it’s not like the cleaning lady doesn’t have enough work to do, and I’m sure she’s not doing that job because she finds it to be the most fun she’s ever had, so why make it harder when you don’t have to?