Navaho Gunleg

Ah — the joys of working at home… Not only are you able to do practical things like, be home to let some ordered goods arrive or go to the bank opened at times a normal person is working, but you also get to meet all those nice people trying to sell you crap.

For instance, I have just had the all-too-obvious set-up of the two Jehova’s Witnesses (one mentor, one student) at my door. You know — the field-training they do to work on their rhetorics. Their weak rhetorics, I might add.

I have always kinda enjoyed ‘discussing’ our differing views. See, I don’t usually just trample over someones beliefs, but if they knock at my door they’re basically asking for it and I was usually all too happy to oblige: they could practice on their rhetorics, while I could practice mine.

If I had taped those dialogs I guess they’d be pretty damn funny because I have those folks all figured out, kinda. As I mentioned in my intro, it’s usually a student and a mentor.

The student does the talking, initially….

A good student can handle the whole conversation, but the moment anything seems to go wrong (for instance, when the student is talking himself into a corner) the mentor steps in — either by saying something, or by a signal, for instance, tapping with a pen on their clipboard to signal the other person that they’re going into the wrong direction and should change the subject as soon as possible. If you know these things and know what to watch out for — oh man — it’s real fun to ‘discuss’ things because you know when you are on the right track.

The fact that they actually try to use psychological tricks on you, have this whole thing planned-out, disgusts me. Inducing fear on people, and counting on the fact that, on this day, at this time, they’ll be talking to unhappy house-men and -wives, or the people without a job. Sure, at any other time, say, in the evening, when the whole family is at home, just having had dinner, just reduces their chances of reaching out to a depressed soul that has time to be alone with the thoughts they plant in a succeptible mind.

And for what? All because they believe there’s still room in their heaven, that any of those 144.000 ‘vacancies’ haven’t been filled up yet (that said, none of those sinful bastards probably even frigging apply) and that their ‘holy quest’ can earn them a place right in there, using faul trickery hauling these poor souls in. Man, those people are in for a real bummer. They’ll find out they’ve cut all family ties with members that didn’t believe that religious stuff, all for nothing.

I’m not going to fall for their crap. Heck, for fun I at one time even quoted Hans Teeuwen (a Dutch comedian), when some of these people were at my door quoting holy scripture and saying that ‘what is written is the truth’ and whatnot.

I told ‘m `Well that’s odd, I got a piece of paper right here..‘, while grabbing a piece of paper that I knew I incidentally had in there, `…and this says that your belief is nonsense.‘.

And then they are trying to convince me that something written down on a mere piece of paper cannot be the word of God…..

So, you can imagine by now that, with that type of subtle insulting (and almost inflamatory) remarks, usually they were the ones retreating and I was the one keeping my foot in the door to continue to tell them how I felt about things (hey, don’t rub the lamp if you don’t want the genie to come out — like I said, they’re knocking at my door so they’re fair game).

I used to make jokes about my handling them by stating that the local JW group really must think that Satan lives at our address. I have to make a note here that I’m not a complete heartless bastard: if it’s an elderly couple at my door trying to ‘pimp their soulwarez‘ I’m not that harsh. I just have this thing against these ‘active’, ‘advertising’ religions. If anything is any good it’ll spread by word of mouth — one cannot and should not force beliefs upon another (unless they’re asking for it).

Lately, even when it is the student/mentor-thing at my door, I’m not that harsh anymore either. It seems I just don’t even let these people waste anymore of my time (even though they still try to). Last couple of times, just as today, I told ‘m that this whole discussion is useless and let them go on their happy ways.

I’m probably just getting too old for that shit…

Jehova’s Witnesses, Rant