Why don’t they just add the cost of the Bible to his hotel tab?
Thank God, truth lives whether it is concealed or not. I don’t hate Ian McKellen, and I pray that God would reveal Himself to him.
Because the Bibles are provided free of charge to the hotel. There is no financial loss suffered that the hotel has to recover, therefore no reason to bill the customer for the loss.
In the early days, most Gideons were traveling businessmen, and it is still an evangelical association of professional men of various Christian faiths. The organization decided in 1908 to provide a Bible to every hotel room in America - a somewhat easier proposition a century ago, when there were about 800,000 rooms, compared to nearly 4.5 million today. 'They were concerned about businessmen being away from home and wanted to provide a good, godly influence while they were away,' said Randall Balmer, professor of American religious history at Barnard College. 'It bespeaks an overwhelmingly Protestant notion of the Bible and scriptures ... the notion that anybody could just pick it up and almost at random leaf through the pages and come away with some sort of spiritual belief.'
-- from the thread The Gideon Bible Observes 100 Years On the Road
Related threads:
Austin Ray Cobb: Naked, Eye-Shadowed Bryan Man Busted for Trashing Best Western [and Gideons Bible]
Malawi: New Testaments Desecrated by Muslim Pupils Attending a Catholic School
Parents Fuming as Texas Schools Let Gideons Provide Bibles to Students
The Good Book in the bedside table [Gideon Bibles not the only thing in hotel rooms these days]
The Gideon Bible Observes 100 Years On the Road
Hotels replacing Bibles with new 'intimacy kits'
So Long, Gideons (Some hotels no longer have a Bible in the room)
LOTR Film Star Ian McKellen Admits To Ripping Out Hotel Bible Sections Against Homosexuality
Some hotel nightstands looking beyond the Bible