True Atheism

or: why I wanted to build an iBible, and why the bible is not a real book.

A couple of weeks ago a friend of mine (hey Chruss!) married. And he and his wife-to-be had a religious as well as a civil ceremony. Since I was invited, I had about two hours of hymns (sung badly by the mostly non-religious guests), sermon and ceremony to look forward to - catholic weddings are an involved affair. Naturally, my atheist mind turned to how to avoid being bored out of my mind, and thus the idea of the iBible was born - a hollowed-out bible where I could hide my iPhone in, thus pretending to follow the ceremony or something while reading something more interesting.

Unfortunately I did not have enough time to put my nefarious plan into action, so I had to suffer like the sinner I am. But, last weekend, I decided to build the damn thing anyway(read all about it here), because you never know when the next wedding will sneak up on you.

My plan was to buy a nice hard-cover bible, and hollow it out, so I went to the local flea-market to look for one. Unfortunately, they were fresh out of bibles. Loads of excellent-looking, antique hard-cover books, but no bible. So I turned around to leave, thinking to myself: "It's a pity there are no bibles, I really wanted to build a book with a secret compartment. But I wouldn't want to destroy a real book for that!"

Then I stopped, and started laughing in the middle of the flea-market. I haven't ever been religious, but even non-religious people seem to have a certain respect for the holy books. Not me though - although I love books, I only seem to love the real ones, you know, like fantasy novels or somesuch.

In the end, I did buy a real book to cut up. I tried hard to chose something of no real value, literary or otherwise, and of course ended up destroying the œuvre of the first nobel price for literature, Sully Prudhomme. Some days, you just can't win.