1. dispatches
  2. The Worldnetdaily's Dishonest Headlines

The Worldnetdaily's Dishonest Headlines

By stcynic on October 22, 2005.

University to Ban Bibles, the headline screams. Brave New Schools, says the tag above the headline. The first sentence reiterates the message:

Edinburgh University in Scotland will begin banning Holy Bibles from its student halls of residence due to concern they are the source of discrimination against students of other faiths.

The mind boggles. The university is really going to ban students from having Bibles in their dorm rooms? Could this possibly be? If this is true, I'll be the first one to protest it. As it turns out, it's not. But you have to go down a couple paragraphs to find out that the headline is a lie:

A Gideon Bible is traditionally placed in the room of all new students, and there are currently about 2,000 bibles in the Pollock Halls campus near Holyrood Park. Gideons International has handed out 63 million Bibles worldwide in places such as hotels, prisons and hospitals.

Since the school has students from 120 countries and all different faith backgrounds, officials believe that the distribution of Bibles could be offensive to some students.

There's a big difference between not allowing an outside group to place a bible in every room regardless of whether the student who moves in there wants one, and "banning Holy Bibles from its student halls of residence." It's the difference between truth and falsehood. Can you imagine the reaction from the WND if the university allowed an outside group to place a copy of the Quran in every room?

Tags
Uncategorized

More like this

UW Still Doesn't Support Free Exercise
I mentioned a few weeks ago the situation at the University of Wisconsin where the university told dorm RAs that they could no longer host bible studies in their dorm rooms because they were afraid that would make them less "approachable" to other students. This was a ludicrous argument then and it…
Two tactics for dealing with religidiots
An elementary school in Missouri has been allowing the Gideons to distribute bibles to students on their lunch hour. It's crazy stupid, a clear violation of the separation of church and state (not that fundie churches care about that anymore). Fortunately, Americans United is on the ball. In its…
ACLU Defending Religious Liberty
Contrary to the hysterically overblown view so common on the religious right (a view intentionally planted there by frauds and hucksters like Pat Robertson), the ACLU regularly goes to court to defend Christian churches and organizations. I've mentioned in the past their work on behalf of Jerry…
ADF on Georgetown's Ministry Decision
Georgetown recently announced that it was not renewing any of its relationships with "affiliated ministries" - outside religious ministries that were allowed to have a presence on that Catholic campus to work with students. This includes many Protestant groups, which has led to a lot of media…

Can you imagine the reaction from the WND if the university allowed an outside group to place a copy of the Quran in every room?

If one wanted to be vicious, one might ask the same questions regarding other books. Like Das Kapital and Mein Kampf. I'm sure that WorldNutDaily would abhor the first, but I'm not so sure about the second.

/sarcasm

Something about this whole thing reminds me of the Urantia book; well i am in an odd mood today, but still. I can't imagine that the percent of those 63 million bibles that were actually opened and read is even close to the percent of Urantia "bibles" that have been read.