Message to all travellers, chamber maids .....

While on my recent travels, I was struck by the phenomenal waste of time and energy spent by The Gideons in making sure that every godforsaken hotel room is furnished with a Bible. However, I have to respect their missionary zeal. As a result, from here on in, I will be leaving a flyer bearing the following message in every Gideon bible I can get my hands on:

To the thoughtful guest who decided to open this Gideon bible:

The purpose of this note is to encourage you to do something more positive with your time than reading a book that, in the words of Sam Harris: “was the work of sand-strewn men and women who thought the earth was flat and for whom a wheelbarrow would have been a breathtaking example of emerging technology.”

If you go ahead and waste your time reading this trash, I believe that you will agree with the following description given by Richard Dawkins in his book “The God Delusion”:

"The God of the Old Testament is arguably the most unpleasant character in all fiction: jealous and proud of it; a petty, unjust, unforgiving control-freak; a vindictive, bloodthirsty ethnic cleanser; a misogynistic, homophobic, racist, infanticidal, genocidal, filicidal, pestilential, megalomaniacal, sadomasochistic, capriciously malevolent bully."

If you think the New Testament is any better, please ponder whether it really necessary for God’s son to be hideously tortured and killed so that we could be “saved”. As Professor Dawkins’ asks, if God wanted to forgive our sins, why not just forgive them? Perhaps more importantly, if God is truly all-knowing, all-powerful and all-loving, why does he allow so much senseless suffering?

If you seriously ponder these questions, you will likely conclude that there is almost certainly no God, at least in the sense that he/she/it is believed to exist by Judeo-Christians. As a result, instead of wasting your time reading the Bible, may I please recommend any or all of the following activities:

• Today (and everyday) commit a random act of kindness towards your fellow man - not for a promise of a reward of heaven and not because of a threat of eternal damnation. Just be nice because you want to be nice. It feels good.
  
• Read a real "good book" – I suggest Harris’ “The End of Faith: Religion, Terror and the Future of Reason ” because it provides one of the best explanations as to how religious faith perpetuates man’s inhumanity to man or Peter Singer’s “How Are We To Live? Ethics In An Age of Self-Interest ”, the title of which speaks for itself.
  
• Send $10.00 (or whatever you can afford) to Oxfam, the United Way or another secular charity of your choice for the benefit of third world development.
  
• Live your life to the fullest because this is the only shot you get – make the best of it.

Please help spread this message by photocopying this note and placing it in the next Gideon Bible you find.

This message has been brought to you by The Atheist Missionary.