I resent even having to do that. If I’m eating dinner, and the doorbell rings, I have to get up to answer it – it could be a tenant, it could be my sister, it could be Publishers Clearinghouse with a check the size of a bedsheet. In other words, it could be important. When I discover that it’s nothing but the LDS, and their 20-year-old “elders” trying to sell me on their moonshine, then I’m ticked. Maybe disproportionately, but I’m ticked all the same.
Unh-unh. Most believers say they have a personal relationship with god. People on these very boards claim to have seen signs that convinced them they were in the presence of The Big Guy.
I never said they didn’t have a right or even that they shouldn’t have that right. I merely said they’re obnoxious, self-righteous assholes if they think it isn’t offensive to knock on strangers’ doors to offer unsolicited religious blather. That’s what makes this country so great. You’re allowed to BE an obnoxious, self-righteous, blathering asshole. And I’m allowed to tell you that you’re doing a fine job of it. And if I did, it would be no more rude an action than theirs.
And again, I’ll respond by saying NOTHING is difficult about saying “no thank you”. But it’s not nearly as easy as just refraining from being a self-righteous, blathering asshole on the doorsteps of strangers.
By the way…I had no idea whether or not you were a dude. It was in response to “Ace.” I thought we were doing nicknames.
In terms of your story, it has little to do with you really.
I’ve sat through hundreds of entirely dubious threads (and dubious is being entirely kind) so I am admittedly jaded.
What has me puzzled, other than the 8:03 a.m. time frame, is 1) You had to, more than once, tell her she couldn’t come in the house. I’ve never seen a JW ask to come in someone’s house without a basis; a reason—what I mean by that is that JWs are quite content to witness to you right at the front door, and if there is interest than it is natural (and common) to be invited in to continue a discussion that the homeowner welcomes. I’ve never seen a JW start the conversation by assuming that they would come in someone’s house—especially since from the very outset you were giving indications they were not welcome. It leaves me puzzled. 2) The “foot in the door as you were closing it” leaves me that much more leery…
My point is not to question the veracity of every posters experience. My guess is that theres something just north of a half million JWs in the Eastern Time Zone, USA. (where you live) I can’t vouch for all of them. Maybe some rogues are calling on SDMB members between 6:15 a.m. and 8:03 a.m. 
But it remains true, the rogues notwithstanding, that JWs meet every moring at 9 or 9:30 for their public ministry. Given that they continue that ministry all day—and during the summer in the early evenings as well—most people who are called on by JWs are called on later than 10:00 a.m. The vast majority of them. (Of course many people are sleeping on Saturday mornings at 10:00 a.m. or later, which is frustrating no matter what time it is)
So this common experience that has JWs-as-6 a.m.-storm-troopers is great theater but not accurate. (even if they someone did try to force themselves into your house at 8:03 a.m.)
I give up. You seem to be using your emotions to guide you, and that’s your prerogative. Enjoy your bitterness (again, the only thing you appear to be getting out of the situation).
I’m not bitter in the least. I simply don’t feel the need to be warm and welcoming to people who are rude to me.
Try as you might.
When you start suggesting that everyone with an anecdote that violates your hard and fast parameters is making it up for theater, you start to look like the one with blinders, and like a jerk. As apocryphal as these early morning visitations, or the fools who are blown away in a religious debate*, may seem to you, you and your cohort’s descriptions of the kind and polite people who respond appropriately to “No thanks” and who would never be pushy strike me as equally dubious. Sure, there may be such, but by and large, these folks seem, at best, more likely to stand there through several polite rebuffs before leaving. I have no problem believing that they’d put a foot in the door. You already said that it is standard practice for them to block you into a seat on the subway and try to talk to you about their lord.
- And I find these anecdotes to be somewhat unlikely, myself, but for likely different reasons. I think that zealots are zealots in large part because they aren’t able to hear or comprehend contradictory information, so I don’t think a debate would have any meaningful impact on them.
I am a weak atheist/strong agnostic. I grew up in fundamentalist household in a community where I was surrounded by Christian fundamentalists of all stripes. When I was younger, I went out of my way to argue with the churchies and tell them, in no uncertain terms, how wrong they were and how stupid they were for buying the pathetic lies that constitute religion. Now, I am older, and I recognize that was hypocracy on my part and merely a reflection of the things I hated about religion. I do not do that any more. In fact, I actively avoid discussions of religion. Live and let live, I say. Believe what you want, just keep it out of my face and don’t fly any airplanes into any large buildings.
But I draw the line at my front door. If someone comes to my house, rings my bell, and wants to try and push his delusions on me, he is met with the full force of the rage I pent up during 19 years of Church of Christ Sunday school. Meeting me on the street or in a social situation is one thing. My house is quite another.
I used to be polite to prosletyzing freaks until my last year of lawschool (I was smack in the middle of the Bible Belt). Frankly I think the very act is arrogant and rude but I respect their right to do it. Anyway, every day I used to come home to piles of tracts shoved in my screen door-fine by me, I was never home when they would come around and I could just throw them out. Until the day my parents sent me a lovely paper Ganesh that I stuck on my door and one of the groups of zealots that visited that day ripped it up and left me the shreds in a bag with a pamphlet from their church about why I was going to hell as an idol-worshipping heathen. In retrospect, I should have probably have called the church up but I’m sure that they would have privately have high-fived the freak that destroyed the evil evil idol. Now I actively screw with their heads although I don’t have as much of a chance since I live in a gated apartment complex in the type of neighbourhood where they’re liable to end up as target practice.
What church was this?
Some non-denom hellfire and brimstone basement operation, I believe. Church of the Quivering Brethren or Church of the Smiting Fiery Hand o’ the Lord etc. etc… I asked around and it was the type of place where everyone stamps and claps and talks in forked tongues or whatever. I swear sometimes I felt like I was living in the Midwest version of some Flannery O’Connor novel.
Strange about LDS missionaries not being pushy. Maybe most of the time they aren’t, but there are exceptions. I met two of them.
I was having a chat with my friend at the train station when two of them approached me. I knew who they are straight away (For gosh sake, they got big black badges pinned on their shirt proclaiming that they are LDS missionaries for the whole world to see). They asked for a few miniutes of our time. I said, “No, my friend and I are having a discussion here.”
“Oh, why not involve us in the discussion?” one of them said. Both are foreginers, so I guess they are travelling missionaries. Now that’s incredibile pushy, by Asians’ standard.
“Actually, no. It’s a private matter.” It’s all right. Maybe we want to listen to them first?
“Sorry, we don’t have the time.” Come on, you are being incrediblly rude to us (Rude, did he say RUDE? Oh man, pot and kettles). You haven’t even give us a chance to speak to you yet.
This drag on and on until it escalated into a shouting match.
I hope this is just a case of zeal and frevour overcoming common senses and cultural sensibilities.
I met a neo-Nazi who used the same methods to proselytize. It was rude when he did it, and it’s rude when anybody does it, love God or not.
As an ex-Mormon growing up in Salt Lake City in the 60s, and a former missionary, I have to disagree with you here. The idea that Blacks descendants of Cain, and were so because they were fence-sitters in the Great War in the Preexistence between Satin and his third of God’s children was linked to the idea that the Lamanite were darkened because of their rebelliousness against God.