Observations and inanities by a second-shift assistant supervisor in the Puppy-Grinding division of the Evil Atheist Conspiracy® (our motto: "Sure it's cruel, but think of the jobs!"), your host, Brent Rasmussen.
The Bible spreading hospital Super-Bug??
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??
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It's time to whip up some plastic bibles, I mean who says books have to be made out of paper? Alternatively you could go back to using clay tablets for your reading material (although it isn't what anyone would call light reading). Then there's having various religious text in slide-show format on the patient's TV, that would only require you to sanitize the buttons (actually lets do this for non-religious books too).
Alternately there's the question of what radiation would do to books, printing and microbes. Could be fun, you stick an infected bible into a radiation chamber, then a few hours later a brain-devouring mutated Bible comes out and starts attacking patients. Patients whose brains have been devoured start mumbling in gibberish. How can they do anything without a brain? Well that's because the Bible laid an egg in their head and what you mistake for gibberish is actually random signals being sent as a result of the egg developing. Then when the new Bibles break out of the patient's heads they look like those mini-pocket bibles they try to foist on you.
"If there is evil in this world, it lurks within the hearts of men" ~Edward D. Morrison, Tales of Phantasia
Plastic?
Just make them out of toilet paper. They would at least be useful.