I'm a little torn on this one:
(CBS/AP) A college atheist group is offering students pornography in exchange for Bibles.
Atheist Agenda calls the exchange "Smut for Smut," prompting prayers and protests from Christian students at the University of Texas San Antonio campus.
Student Monica Cornado says it's offensive to compare pornography to "the Word of God."
University officials say the atheist group has the right to conduct the swap.
UTSA spokesman David Gabler says, "As long as students are not violating laws or violating the Constitution, they have the freedom of speech and assembly."
The Atheist Agenda started at UTSA in 2005, and their first "Smut for Smut" campaign blew up into a national media sensation, reports CBS affiliate KENS in San Antonio. Past president Thomas Jackson was deluged with interview requests, and debated Tucker Carlson, the bow-tie-wearing conservative pundit, on MSNBC.
I tend to side with Hemant Mehta that this isn't really the best way to win friends and influence people. But I do, reluctantly, see their point--there are some correlations between the Bible and porn.
For one thing, both seem to put women down on occasion.
Both hold out the illusion of a perfect, accepting, but ultimately too-good-to-be true person who will make you feel good, no matter what you have done. Or conversely, make you feel bad no matter what you want to do. And also, both porn and the Bible can give you a false sense of how other people truly interact in real life--because both are based in wish-fulfillment fantasies.
But ultimately, I think there are genuine differences between porn and the Bible. For example, as with communion wine, the Bible used as porn qua porn would make you queasy before it gave you a buzz. And also, porn doesn't dictate your whole outlook or tell you who to be. Mostly, it's just there to help you physically "get off". The Bible does more than that--the atheist vs. theist debate should really lie in that "more than" area, I think.
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