The Bible as a thief repellent

His thought process as described to me was as follows: Thieves are dishonest. And since dishonest people, people who would steal, don't read the Bible, then his money would be safe.

I thought it was interesting that he had this connection between reading the Bible and not stealing. It would be ridiculous to say that no Christians (or Bible-reading Christians, I should say) ever steal, or that those people who don't read the Bible are therefore weaker in their morals; that you have to be religious to refrain from behaving abominably. That leads me to this:

Unfortunately, "Christian" equals "good" (and furthermore, the only way to be good) in the minds of some Christians. I've heard it from Americans too here in the USA; people who think that "un-American" is a good way to insult someone. I'm not very patriotic about the U.S. of A. even though I pretty much like the way my life is going over here. And if you called me un-American or unchristian, I would be far from offended. I suppose it's just the way humans tend to think; anything that they believe in is synonymous with "good," and anything that is different from that or especially that goes against that is very, very bad.

And to think I got all this philosophical crap just from hearing where some dude hides his cash.

Swankivy's writeup triggered a flood of memories when I was the IT Officer for a Baptist theological college.

The Bible as a thief repellent.

I can definitely say that this is a very ineffective way of protecting your possessions. You would think that a theological college would be the height of goodness and virtue. Ha! You could not be further from the truth.

The College had a continuing and quite serious run of thefts from the library and general College environs during the four years I worked at there. To be fair, the level of theft was probably on par for a non-theological location, but it was so much more noticeable given that the thefts occurred in a place where 'thou shalt not steal' is a basic tenet.

Which simply reinforces the notion that saying that you are a Christian means absolutely nothing. It's your actions that show what you are. However, this also means that using the Bible as a thief repellent is not only ineffectual, but simply stupid.

I can comprehend the very basic logic used to justify such an idea, though we can more or less look at reality to see it's not quite true. For example, consider the number of people who claim to be Christian, who own and read the Bible, who still end up in prison.

But here's an even greater disproof of this idea.

A friend of mine worked for many years for Waldenbooks. She managed a number of different stores, around the area, including the one at the Woodfield Mall in Schaumburg, IL, a very large and busy mall.

One of the interesting things she discovered during her career in bookstore managment is that there was one book that was always stolen from the bookstore more than any other book. That book was The Bible.

From her experience, it would seem that perhaps hiding one's money, or other valuables, in their Bible is not such a good idea.