Scott Mange's blog

I have some good news to report. As you may or may not know, I'm a member of the Abimelech Society. You can read more about them here. We are dedicated to the legal removal of religious materials from the public sphere. In other words, if someone offers us a tract, we ask how many we can have, take them all and then round-file them. Those Gideon bibles at hotels; gone! Prayer meeting announcements on the grocery store pin-board; removed. Etc., etc., etc., ad nauseum because it always comes back.

Until yesterday......

Friends

A quick reminder the election is coming up rather quickly and as usual, your local Board of Elections needs poll workers. As a matter of fact, the deadline may have already passed but still, you should make the effort. And if not this year, next year for sure!

I'm taking a vacation day Tuesday November 6 so I can work the polls. Start time is 5:00am and quitting is 7:00pm with about an hour clean up. Pay is something like $120. Not bad for 15 hrs. work! I'll be donating my pay to the ACLU on top of the dollar a day donation to NPR.

Please join me this year in working the polls and thereby, in part, let the world know the Atheists are willing to do something positive and patriotic.

I was surprised to hear that Bibles may be partly responsible for helping spread the hospital "superbug" methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus (MRSA).

But the only information I could find on-line concerning a link between MRSA and the Bible was from a 2005 series of articles in the UK. Please see:

Superbug threatens Bible's place in hospitals

However, this might be an item of concern. According to WikiPedia:

The major issue is that there are a number of factors that can lead to someone's death, and it is believed that patients with MRSA bacteraemia are sicker and will consequently have a higher mortality because of their underlying illness. However, several studies including one by Blot and colleagues that have adjusted for underlying disease still found MRSA bacteraemia to have a higher attributable mortality than MSSA bacteraemia.

Precisely those people most sick, and I assume most likely to be interested in after-life issues, are most likely to pick up a Bible and potentially infect it. Because it can't be cleaned with traditional methods without destroying the book, the "bug" can sit on a Bible and await its next victim.

Again, according to Wikipedia:

As MRSA has the capability to survive on surfaces and fabrics including privacy curtains or garments worn by care providers, the need for complete surface sanitation is necessary to eliminate MRSA in areas where patients are recovering from invasive procedures.

So, should hospitals and the Gideons stop providing Bible at patient bedsides? I'm assuming the patient's could bring their own from home or the hospital chaplancy could provide them on an as-requested basis.

Your thoughts??

Maybe you're like me. You go to a hotel while on business or vacation and you find another one of those damn Gideon's Bibles. What to do with it?? Well, as a newly minted member of the Abimelech Society, I replace it with a nice novel (usually classical literature) from my local paper back exchange store.

I learned about the Society from this link:

http://www.positiveatheism.org/writ/abimelec.htm

The article reads in part -

The Abimelechs are an association of Atheist commercial, business, and professional men and women who have as one of their objects: The removal from circulation of the so-called Word of God or Holy Bible, from hotels, motels, hospitals, school classrooms, university dormitories, penal institutions, and many other places, and by the confiscation of New Testaments from school children, service personnel, and nurses.

No....not that Bill Murray. I mean William Murray, son of Madalyn Murray O'Hair and current chairman of the Religious Freedom Coalition.

I had been reading about the life of Madalyn and was amazed at the amount of brutality her family had to endure for their part in removing mandatory prayer from public schools. It ran the gamut from simple assault, to property damage, to segregation, to what may have been an attempted murder.

While reading about this I found myself feeling a great deal of gratitude to them, and especially Bill, for speaking out and standing up for what is right so that I and my children will never be faced with the same circumstances (hopefully).

With this in mind, I decided to write Mr. Murray a thank-you letter

I was recently reading one of those "Dear Abby" posts by Billy Graham called My Answer. It reads:

DEAR REV. GRAHAM: Recently, you told someone in your column to pray for a friend of theirs who claimed to be an atheist. Well, I don't believe in God either and I don't want anyone praying for me. I'm happy just the way I am, and I don't need some holier-than-thou Christian acting like he's better than me. --H.M.

Dear H.M.: Let me ask you a question: What would you do if you discovered a cure for cancer -- especially if you had been healed yourself? Would you forget about it, or decide you'd only tell a few friends about it? Or would you decide to make as much money as you could from it, and only let a very few wealthy people have access to it?

I hope not. I hope instead that you would do everything you could to tell others about it, and to make the cure available to as many people as possible. Not everyone would believe you, and not everyone would even admit they had cancer (if they did). But you would keep trying -- not because you thought you were better than people who still had cancer, but because you cared.