Seven, you apparently have some troubles in your heart…
Come, brother, let’s pray together and…
*OW! Stop it! OWW!! 
Heh heh
Installer: So tell me,. how you feel about this stuff?
Me: Well,. during the Rectification of the Vuldronaii, the Traveler came as a large and moving Torb! Then, during the Third Reconciliation of the Last of the Meketrex Supplicants, they chose a new form for him, that of a giant Sloar! Many Shubs and Zuuls knew what it was to be roasted in the depths of a Sloar that day, I can tell you!
Beter than mine. That would have me genuflect before running while looking over my shoulder
I swear, some atheists have no balls. Why all the coy games and demure hints? Why not just come out and say, “I don’t want to discuss this. Do you understand what I am saying to you? If you raise the topic again, I’ll call your employer.”
I get the whole “annoying JW thing” but I’m kind of surprised that nobody is jumping up and down about this
WTF? When did you turn into ‘second class customer’? I suppose the other guy’s job is so much more important than yours, that he can show up to yours 2 hours late, futz around, then not even finish before leaving again. Of course, he comes back at a completely unreasonable hour then STILL doesn’t finish.
You know what? Blab all you want about whatever god you feel like, leave brochures in my bathroom if you need to, just finish the fucking job and get out of my house.
My response to witnessing of any persuasion is to tell the proselytizing sons of bitches that I believe in God, I just happen to think he’s an asshole. Sometimes the conversation lasts 30 seconds or so after that, but most often it ends immediately, and they don’t come back.
If one was holding my cable hostage though, I might be tempted to just smile and nod.
Coward. Every atheist worth his salt should have a pen firmly gripped in hand.
Surely they should not attempt to proselytise on one’s doorstep, and certainly when you are effectively paying them to work? Anything which terminates such unnacceptable behaiviour with the least fuss and embarassment to all, lies or no, is fair.
But, yes, personally I would tell them that I would deny God even were he to appear before my very eyes in heaven.
Damn straight. I keep a sharpened Bic in a holster for just such an occasion! I have to wipe chunks of hand-flesh off it pretty much on a weekly basis.
Bwahahahahahaha!!! Do you actually have that memorized, or did you have to look it up? Because - man, perfect quote. Beautiful.
Ahh.
A Jehovah’s Witnesses thread.
Years ago, I was much younger, and didn’t live here. I lived in a part of a certain town, far from here, that seemed infested with Jehovah’s Witnesses.
At the time, I didn’t have a thing against any religious group, creed, belief system, or much of anyone else.
I still don’t.
*Except Jehovah’s Witnesses. *
You see, these Jehovah’s Witnesses used to Witness the hell out of this one neighborhood. Once or twice a month, I could count on one or two of them knocking on my door, wanting to come in and discuss “The Watchtower” with me.
This wouldn’t have been so bad, except that they INVARIABLY showed up around eight a.m. or so… on a Saturday or Sunday morning.
I was in college at the time, unemployed, and independently wealthy from the royalties on my patents on various evil rubber sex toys, and the idea of being awake and ambulatory at eight a.m. on ANY day for ANY reason was durn near against MY religion.
…so like a sucker, I’d shrug into a bathrobe, stagger blindly into the living room, and open the door, expecting to find my old man there, telling me to get dressed, your grandfather’s had a stroke or something…
…and be confronted by two clean-cut young men in white shirts and ties who want to give me literature and can they come in and discuss The Watchtower with me?
Now, I’m not fond of a lot of churchy folks to begin with, and I’m especially suspicious of the ones that come HUNTING ME DOWN. Nearly all religions preach humility, and for a quality so highly valued, you sure don’t see a lot of it in many of these folks, and I don’t much like being treated high-handedly or looked down the nose at, on the off chance that I don’t happen to subscribe to a particular godfest, okay?
…and in time, I came to resent these people. I quit being polite. I got rather curt with them. “No thank you, I already have a religion,” followed by closing the door in their faces because if you DON’T close the door in their faces, they’ll KEEP TALKING, the bastards won’t LET you get away gracefully and politely…
In fact, some of them seem to THRIVE on being verbally abused, cursed at, sprayed down with garden hoses, and generally badly treated. Years later, my wife told me that this is PART of Witnessing – being kicked in the butt by the Infidels. This is part of how Witnesses earn their way into Heaven! The more dirt you throw at them, the more exalted they’ll be when they get there… the sweeter it is when they manage to CONVERT someone… the jollier it is, altogether. In short, being spat upon is PART OF THEIR RELIGION.
And it didn’t stop them. They kept coming back.
…and this culminated in an ugly incident one Saturday morning.
You see, the previous Friday night, we’d been into caffeine… and Civilization.
Civilization, the old Avalon Hill board game. Seven players. Each player takes the part of a Stone Age tribe, and you have to build a Classical Civilization, based on trade, warfare, and individual achievements like music, architecture, metalworking, agriculture, and so on. Ever played it? It’s a kick, and educational, too…
…but a seven-player game rarely takes less than eight hours.
We’d just finished up. We’d been rolling dice and moving mice for about fifteen hours… and that sonofabitch Bobo had done his usual trick of cornering the goddamn salt market, ALL over the Mediterreanean, and the other players LET HIM DO IT, every damn game, and I’d had HELL keeping the Minoans out of Thrace, and Troll had been spreading plagues, iconoclasm, and heresy left and right – he’d managed to delay the Greeks’ entry into the Late Iron Age for two whole turns… and the Creature kept wanting to expand up out of Egypt (he stomped on the Egyptian player early – he’d started out in Africa and, as Zimbabwe, had squeezed the Egyptian player out of the game singlehanded, but was still dumb enough to trade Bobo salt for ochre)…
…we were WEIRD. It was seven-thirty in the morning, and we were stonkered on caffeine, nicotine, ancient history, and fatigue poisons – an ugly mix. One by one, we began getting up, putting away the board and tokens, and clearing away the mess.
Since it was my house, I decided to go to bed. I stripped down to my skivvies, and dived into the Legendary Waterbed, about which there’s another thread around here somewhere.
I’d been there maybe fifteen minutes… just enough time to get REALLY comfortable… when there was a knock on the door. Troll and Bobo were still there, but at that time, we weren’t living together, and they weren’t comfortable answering my door… so I got up, still dressed in nothing but Fruit-Of-The-Looms, and answered the door, fully expecting that it was the Creature or someone, having forgotten his keys or some durn thing…
…and, in the pale morning light, I found myself face to face with a fat lady in a flowered dress and her two small children. They all seemed quite surprised to be confronted with a sudden hairy near-naked man who stank of old cigarettes and the dust of ancient history. Precisely what they DID expect to find at my house at eight a.m. on a Saturday morning, I couldn’t tell you.
We all stood there and stared at each other for a moment.
And then my eyes focused. I saw what it was she was clutching to her breast.
PAMPHLETS. And copies of THE WATCHTOWER.
I screamed. Well, perhaps howled is a better term. I wasn’t afraid, of course… I wasn’t even really… “angry”.
But I’d been comfortable, dammit, and about to drift off to sleep, and I’d taken THIRD place in the dratted game, thanks to Troll’s plague and Bobo and his goddamn salt-based economy, and I’d been on the VERY EDGE of drifting off to dreamland, and it was EIGHT goddamn A.M. on a SATURDAY morning, and HERE THE BASTURDS WERE, ALL OVER AGAIN!
So I screamed. Loud. Guttural. Absolutely fucking berserk.
Troll and Bobo looked up.
The woman screamed, too.
Her children turned tail and ran.
She stood there, mouth hanging open, brain locked up on her from sheer shock.
It occurred to me that it would be nice if she would run away, too. It would certainly be convenient. How could I make this happen? Perhaps if I did something that seemed threatening…
I glanced at the umbrella holder next to the door.
In it were two umbrellas, a cane, a large rubber double-ended dildo, and a sword. A real sword, genuine Toledo steel, left over from RenFaire. I grabbed it, waved it around, and screamed again.
She screamed again, too, spun around, and took off running across my front yard.
…
…now I don’t really know why I did what I did next. I was still kind of asleep, you’ll remember, and I’d been up all night, and I sure as anything wasn’t really thinking straight.
I do know, though, that I decided that she might stop running. I didn’t want her to stop running. I wanted her to keep running clear to Oklahoma, if at all possible. The only way I could think of to make her keep running was the thing I had done to make her start running in the first place.
So I took off running, too. I screamed some more, and began waving the sword, like a loony about to make Viking salad out of some luckless soul.
The children had stopped running at the sidewalk. When the mostly naked hairy man erupted from the bushes in pursuit of Mama, waving a sword and shrieking like a banshee with kidney stones, they took OFF, with Mama right behind, and the crazy hairy man in hot pursuit.
I screamed again.
Mama screamed again.
The kids, not to be left out, screamed REAL loud.
Well, I didn’t want the cycle to stop anytime soon. I screamed again. Mama screamed again, and the kids screamed again, and we all ran across the street at the end of the block.
Well, as you’ll imagine, this was kind of noisy.
Some people poked their heads out of windows. A few front doors opened. People were looking to see what was happening.
…and it occurred to me that this particular course of action might have consequences that I had not foreseen.
I stopped running.
By now, the kids had reached a car, and were tugging at the handle and crying and screaming for *Mama, Mama, the car is locked! *
Mama hadn’t evem looked over her shoulder, and was still booking, all three hundred pounds of her. They all leaped into the car, all in a twinkling.
I roared at them and waved my sword, as they peeled out and drove away.
I stood there in the middle of someone’s front yard in my underwear, holding a broadsword.
People looked at me.
Fortunately, at the time, I was well equipped to save face – I had hair down past my shoulders, and a beard out to here. I scowled around me. A couple of people closed their front doors.
Feeling dangerous and foolish, I walked back to my house. Troll and Bobo solemnly applauded as I stuck the sword back in the umbrella stand and went to bed.
I understand the cops drove up and down the street a few minutes later, but nothing ever came of it.
…and for the rest of the time I lived at that address… the Jehovah’s Witnesses NEVER bothered us again.
Master Wang-Ka, you rock.
Holy SHIT! falls over laughing
That is the funniest thing I have ever read!!!
I have a few steel items myself. Perhaps I will keep them by the front door for just such an occasion…hmm…
Odd. Now I WANT the Jehovah’s to come to my house…evil cackling
I also heard somewhere that if you tell them you’re Mormon (I think, someone might need to confirm), they hightail it…Haven’t had a chance to try THAT one yet, but I do think the sword thing is going to be my first line of defense…
As the boards local witness (really half of a witness, as I have not been there in atleast 6 months) I can tell you that preaching on the job is looked on in a negative light. Its ok if it comes up in conversation, but trapping people into listening to you isn’t. I go to the local Kingdom Hall in my town, and if I had the same experience as you, I would not hesitate to call the church elders.
Bob Dole is an atheist?
Can’t say that I agree with the “coward” assessment here.
The problem is that, even now, there are many people out there who have been raised to have at least some semblance of manners and who value polite social interaction. This is, I think, one of the reasons why these door-to-door proselytizers (and telemarketers for that matter) inspire so much resentment and ire. By their very nature they are forcing people to either listen to a bunch of crap for which they hold no interest, or to be rude. Their very existence is an affront to genteel sensibilities.
I don’t get it. A JW pair came to my door just a few days ago. They were very polite. I told them I’m not Christian and why. We actually had an interesting conversation.
All of the times JWs have come by my house they have been nice and not at all pushy.
Maybe I am unique in having positive experiences, but I don’t see the need to be mean to them.
I’ve seen the piece that Master Wang-Ka pasted. Can’t remember where, maybe here. But I’ve seen it.
Can’t speak for your uniqueness… but most of the JWs that showed up at my place weren’t THAT bad. A few kept yammering up until I closed the door in their faces, but most were no worse than your average Girl Scout on a cookie run.
Two factors triggered the event of which I spoke, above:
-
REPETITION. They simply would not quit. It wasn’t the same ones, over and over, but they simply … kept… showing… up, month after month, once, twice, three times a month. I kept having the same conversation over and over. It wore through any semblance of courtesy I ever had towards the JWs. I finally got to the point of simply saying “Go away,” and closing the door in their faces, a thing I wouldn’t dream of doing to any other sort of human who came to my door (except possibly magazine salesmen).
-
TIMING. They always showed up WAY too early on a weekend morning. On weekend mornings, I am not generally a civil person until I’ve had my coffee and a bite of breakfast. Waking me up to discuss religion is simply a bad idea, particularly if you’re a complete stranger, and especially if fourteen OTHER members of your church have attempted to do the same thing since the beginning of the year.
Nowadays, my attitude towards Jehovah’s Witnesses is rather poor. I have had it demonstrated repeatedly that they care not in the least for MY convenience, time, and so forth, in the pursuit of their vicious little agenda. Consequently, they have left a bad taste in my mouth, so to speak. I will not join them, discuss religion with them, or tolerate them on my stoop for more than a minute, and that includes the time they spent ringing my bell, waiting for me to answer, and the time it will take them to get down my driveway and onto some portion of Texas I do not own.
Well, yeah. It’s in the LAST Jehovah’s Witness thread, around here somewhere. Or perhaps the Door-To-Door Salesman thread…