Toast With the Testaments

A report and comment on religious trends and events being covered by the media.  This week’s item is from The Detroit Free Press with a headline:  Breakfast Bibles.  General Mills has apologized for packing CD ROM versions of the New International Version of the scriptures along with computer game inside 12 million boxes of Cheerios, Cheks and Cinnamon Toast Crunch.  The NIV is the most popular version among evangelicals.  It is the company’s policy not to advance any particular set of religious beliefs, Minneapolis based General Mills said in a statement.  Inclusion of this material does not conform to our policy and we apologize for the lapse.  But the apology came too late, the boxes of cereal with the CD ROMS are headed for grocery shelves across the country and will be distributed through August.  Giving away Bibles on CD-ROMs that also include computer games and dictionaries is a $10 million marketing idea that soured.  General Mills’ partners in the promotions spent a year working on a strategy to include the Bible in the cereal boxes without causing controversy.   There is no mention on the outside of the boxes that the Bible is on the CD ROM, the Detroit Free Press reported.  General Mills says it didn’t know the Bible had been put on CD-ROM’s and that it was slipped in without our knowledge, the company said in a statement.  That is a flat out lie, Gregory Swan of Rhino Soft Interactive, a Wisconsin firm that helped create the CD-ROM’s told the news.  General Mills got spooked with the idea of the Bible in their boxes, Phyllis Tickle, and editor at Publishers Weekly, told the free press. There would have been some controversy, she said, but this probably would have been a very popular idea.  Swan, an evangelical Christian, developed the idea of marketing the Bible as part of a reference library for computers including a dictionary, thesaurus and encyclopedia.  He said his company thought the cereal box idea was going to be very popular with millions of Christians.  Controversy arose in March when Disney Interactive, whose computer version of the television game show, Who Wants to be a Millionaire, is included on the CD-ROMs told Swan that the Bible was too controversial and demanded it be taken off the millionaire CD ROMs.  That held up production, software developer Ken Patterson told the Free Press.

Tom:

Well Dave, you know, this is interesting because on the one hand they got into this because they thought it would be a very popular idea, something that would particularly impress, you know, millions of Christians, but then they got cold feet.

Dave:

Supposedly, the world’s number one best seller.

Tom:

Right, but then they walked in fear of the controversy it would create.

Dave:

Well Tom, you are catching me off guard here, I don’t really know how to respond to this.  Personally, I wouldn’t have put a Bible in there knowing that some people would be offended.  Now I don’t think we can push God on anybody, in fact God doesn’t push himself on anybody.  On the other hand, why should the Bible be so controversial?  There are all kinds of books out there, people can read anything they want, if you don’t want it throw the CD away.

Tom:

Yeah, just like a toy, or something, well you get CD-ROM’s in the mail all the time trying to get you on the internet or online with America Online or whoever.

Dave:

But the Bible is controversial because if we are going to be honest about the Bible, it says all other religions are false, okay, and they don’t want that.  So you can come out with any idea and the liberals are very liberal about everything except anything that challenges their liberalism, they will not allow that.  It just affects the day in which we live, and the ideas that people have and what we were talking about earlier.  Everybody wants to go their own way, but one way they don’t want to go is to believe that there is a God who created them who had some definite ideas, some definite morals for them, and the Bible makes that very clear, and they don’t like that.

Tom:

You know, Dave, with the interest in computers, you know I have Bible software and I think it’s absolutely tremendous, not only can I find what I want quicker, can I check it against, you know we’ve said over and over again here, if you’re going to search the scriptures make sure that scripture interprets scripture, and these are certainly vehicles that help that.  On the one hand, you know you said earlier I think that we are finding scriptural illiteracy out there.  Who is going to use these things, I mean they are free but who would use them?

Dave:

Well, hopefully it would eliminate, or at least help to mitigate, reduce the amount of biblical illiteracy.  People don’t read very much anymore, although books do sell but we’re becoming illiterate in a lot of ways.  God gave us His Word, in words, it’s written in a Book and it’s to be read.  And Tom, I guess I could offend people I don’t want to get off on something else, but sometimes as I see some of these films that have been made, supposedly  to depict the life of Jesus, and we’ve got inadequate actors, special effects trying to improve the Bible, you know, what’s wrong with the Word of God?  He speaks to us in His Words and we need to get back and meditate upon the Word of God and search the scriptures daily, that’s what this program is all about, unfortunately, everybody doesn’t want to do that.  I don’t think you can force it upon them; you might have been able to encourage them in a cereal box.

Tom:

That’s not too coercive, the idea of a finding, it doesn’t take much to offend people.

Dave:

That’s true, Tom, and yet nobody seems to be offended about offending God, nobody seems to be offended about the fact that this whole world is just going on merrily its way, making it’s own plans without even thinking about God, that offends me highly.  People have their own ideas of what they want to be offended about I guess.

Tom:

Dave, you know one of the things that I’m finding, I was just going through a Christian magazine the other day and they are talking about sort of a resurgence in the popularity of Christianity, not just Tim LaHaye’s books but now there are films that are out there, then the cross over films, and so on.  Does that worry you?  You know on the one hand we want to encourage people  to get into God’s Word and so on, so we would like it to be popular but at the same time when things get popular somehow they go sour or go South very quickly.

Dave:

I used to travel a bit, not a great deal, but we had the privilege to taking Bibles and things behind the Iron Curtain, and I can remember the Soviet citizens back then, I mean the Christians, asking, Why is Christianity so popular in America? And we’re being persecuted for it over here?  I was speaking to Robert Anderson the other day and one of the things he said was the majority is usually right in most things, but when it comes to religion everybody wants something and religion is the one place where that rule doesn’t work.  You can almost count on it, it’s wrong and I hate to see that happening with Christianity because Jesus was not popular.