(June 4, 2015 at 5:34 pm)Losty Wrote: How do the Spanish speaking jehovas witnesses always find me? Is there some sort of radar for people who speak Spanish?Oddly enough, it's the opposite for me, which is funny because my lineage IS Spanish. Most people think I'm Jewish or Italian. Very few people have ever picked up that I am Puerto Rican.
As for how they find you, JWs keep a register of the homes they have visited, including the language spoken. That way you aren't being approached by JWs that don't speak your primary or preferred language. These registers are not always very well maintained, to the extent that we would occasionally get a visit from JWs even though we were JWs.
As for 8am visits, sweet jesus... I'm glad we never did that when I was a JW. We didn't even assemble to prepare to go out until 9:30 or so, and as far as I know they still do that around here. Not sure where you live, Becca, so it might be because of local hospitality. If we'd knocked on people's doors on Sunday at 8am in the Bronx, I'd probably have been shot a few times. Now I'm curious, since I'll be moving to the Ohio suburbs in a couple of months, when/if they will visit my home. As for waiting for people to approach, I have noticed that recently some JWs are setting up these little kiosk stands filled with literature, and they stand next to it. When I was an active JW, our version of street work (ahem) meant that we walked along and approached anyone we encountered.
The idea behind the door-to-door work is that JWs believe that the only path to salvation is to be a JW in good standing. It doesn't matter how good a person you are, if you're not in the club when god finally brings his wrath upon the world, you're going to die and stay dead. So for them there is a certain urgency in helping as many people get into the religion and become saved. The guilt that can come from 'losing' a loved one or friend to 'the world' is one example of the harm religion can do to people.
"Well, evolution is a theory. It is also a fact. And facts and theories are different things, not rungs in a hierarchy of increasing certainty. Facts are the world's data. Theories are structures of ideas that explain and interpret facts. Facts don't go away when scientists debate rival theories to explain them. Einstein's theory of gravitation replaced Newton's in this century, but apples didn't suspend themselves in midair, pending the outcome. And humans evolved from ape- like ancestors whether they did so by Darwin's proposed mechanism or by some other yet to be discovered."
-Stephen Jay Gould
-Stephen Jay Gould
