Religion Today Summaries, April 26, 2007—There are at least two good reasons to stop smoking. Number one: It may damage your health. Number two: It raises the production costs for Bibles, ASSIST News Service reports. The Chinese craving for cigarettes is responsible for rising paper costs in bible printing, according to the business manager of the German Bible Society, Felix Breidenstein. Because of the rising demand for cigarette paper in China the special thin paper used in bible printing is getting more expensive, as Breidenstein told the German news magazine Der Spiegel. The German Bible Society sells approximately 400,000 bibles per year.
Update 4/27 - Smoking Bible pages actually does happen, as attested by a Bible Network News audio report about a prisoner whose chaplain asked him not to smoke the book of John.
Whoda thunk it? I never would have associated Bible pages with cigarette papers, but who knows?
Reminds me of something I heard Phil Gulley say once--he told about a woman who wanted her chickens to lay "Scripture eggs," so she fed them slips of paper with Bible verses on them. Since I know nothing about a chicken's digestive OR reproductive system, I'm leaving that one alone.
~~Angie
3 comments:
I can add some light to that profound thought, Angie! My best friend and I were hanging around when her parents butchered some of their chickens. Sometime after the headless chickens fell to the ground after the cliched "running around," we noticed some undeveloped eggs with typing on them. Somehow, the newspaper they'd eaten actually had been printed on the eggs. :-)
Oh, man, that's bizarre! But what a great way for a CIA spy to get a message out of the country. Just send your contact a chicken . . . :-)
Angie
I did a Yahoo search on "tobacco" and "devil," and found an article from the New England Journal of Medicine that opens with the following: "Tobacco companies have come to personify the devil...." I have no doubt he is behind this.
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