atheist books in hotels
Offline This is a copy of a message I sent to the RRS. I am posting it here because I got an auto-reply saying it was likely they wouldn't get to my e-mail and I should post on the forums....
Hello, my name is Max and I am finishing my last year at the University of Nevada in Las Vegas. I had an idea to start a campaign to put various books (i.e. Dawkins, Harris, Dennett, "How We Believe" by Michael Shermer, "Losing Faith in Faith" by Dan Barker, and others) in hotels and motels next to the bible. I was thinking of starting a website to get donations and to recruit people to participate, but I do not even know where I would begin or how to set up such an endeavor. I also do not have an abundance of time or money, but I really like this idea and would like to get it going. I was hoping you all at the RRS might be able to help get it started or give me tips on how to begin and proceed from there. Any ideas, suggestions, or help you can provide would be very much appreciated. Thanks!!!
-Max
Evil prospers only when good people fail to act.
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That's an awesome idea. Thanks for posting.
I'm afraid that most of the books would end up in the trash and never be read.
Perhaps a more feasible and inexpensive idea would be to start a campaign of people putting those "Disclaimer" stickers on the bibles in hotels. Get an inexpensive inkjet printer and some of that sticker paper (even the cheap paper kind), print them out, and distribute them.
If nothing else you could post plenty of templates that people could download and print, and include links to good deals on the sticker media. Come up with lots of good ones, then collect donations until you have enough to get the stuff to start printing your own. You might even be able to get away with slipping a few stickers in athiest books at bookstores and/or libraries for the readers to distribute.
The main thing here is that it wouldn't be your books that end up in the trash, but rather theirs.
This kind of thing might raise questions of legality, though, so I would want to research it further before moving forward with any such thing, but it's something to start with. Perhaps you could print small flyers on regular paper to slip inside the same bibles and such. Ultimately there are similar things that you can do without much money, if you're so inclined (and motivated). Work out a good plan, make a website, then talk to other websites of similar interest.
You're going to have to get the hospitality industies general consent to pull this off in any meaningful way. You may be able to leave a book beside the bible in a room you are vacating, but there's nothing stopping the cleaning crew from throwing it out before the next guest arrives. And you'll only be leaving it in one or two rooms, when the place could have a thousand rooms. My suggestion? Start a hotel chain.
Enlightened Atheist, Gaming God.
Or how about we just put those "warning" stickers on Bibles in hotels?
Or how about "Parental Advisory", "This book contains murder, hatred, racism, sex, incest, mass murder, strong language, brutal violence, more sex, more incest, more hatred, more murder, total annihilation, brutal murder... etc"
That's what I meant. But I didn't want to type all that. I'm lazy.
Great minds think alike. I didn't mind typing it for both of us.
Thanks! I appreciate that, my friend.
I doubt if it will work - the FFRF tried to get them to do this in the late '80s - Dan Barker has a chapter about it in "Losing Faith in Faith"
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