Posts: 29661
Threads: 116
Joined: February 22, 2011
Reputation:
159
RE: Yes!!
July 7, 2012 at 5:53 am
(This post was last modified: July 7, 2012 at 6:02 am by Angrboda.)
You people don't know how fortunate and blessed you are. I live in a subsidized highrise apartment complex, and no one ever tries to convert me. I have to order out for crazies, and even then, the selection's not very good.
This winter, one of my atheist groups and I visited a recently constructed Church of Scientology. They were very nice and sweet, if you ignored some strangeness, the lies, and the double-talk whenever you asked them a hard question. It wasn't until months later that the organizer and myself were talking about potential future church tours to a megachurch that he informed me that the entire time we were there the Scientologists had been videotaping us. I felt sad that I didn't notice it at the time, and I don't know what my feelings about it would have been if I'd known at the time. He was somewhat creeped out about it. Knowing me, and my competitive, challenging nature, it just might have lit the afterburners in me and filled me with a sublime sensation of mirth concerning the utter absurdity of it all. I still want to visit a megachurch, but I'm afraid to drive to one, as I have stickers of the multi-armed goddess Kali in my car windows, and I don't trust that some evangelical redneck wouldn't vandalize my car in protest.
Posts: 13901
Threads: 263
Joined: January 11, 2009
Reputation:
82
RE: Yes!!
July 7, 2012 at 5:54 am
RELEASE THE HORNETS!
You can fix ignorance, you can't fix stupid.
Tinkety Tonk and down with the Nazis.
Posts: 2968
Threads: 10
Joined: June 2, 2012
Reputation:
44
RE: Yes!!
July 7, 2012 at 6:24 am
Oh God, when I was a kid some Mormons had the misfortune of knocking on our door and my Mum and her best friend invited them in and did their best to terrorise the poor chaps. It was so funny, they were trying to force them to drink and coming on to them quite heavily! Ha. Funny thing is though, they kept coming back to try and "help" them!
You could have had sooo much fun with them, man!
Posts: 13051
Threads: 66
Joined: February 7, 2011
Reputation:
92
RE: Yes!!
July 7, 2012 at 2:32 pm
Interestingly enough, the Mormon's conversation starter has been evolving since I've been living in my current house. They used to start with, "Have you heard the story of Joseph Smith?" Apparently, too many people actually did know the story of Joseph Smith, so now they start of with some sort of existential question like, "What do you think the meaning of life is?"
Even if the open windows of science at first make us shiver after the cozy indoor warmth of traditional humanizing myths, in the end the fresh air brings vigor, and the great spaces have a splendor of their own - Bertrand Russell
Posts: 74
Threads: 6
Joined: April 11, 2012
Reputation:
1
Yes!!
July 8, 2012 at 2:10 pm
Yeah he brought up Joseph smith but it was after he said "I know that god is real and I know he has prophets on earth" and after he kept saying I know... I know... I finally interrupted and asked what evidence he had that he could be so confident and he then went on to use the book of Mormon as his evidence, the gold plates, etc. I could hear the shakiness in his voice coming over him at that point. He then told me I should try praying. I told him how I had been raised fundamentalist Christian and that I had tried praying but it never did anything. He said I needed to pray about something specific and I said I had. I basically told him that prayer failed, and that I realized that if I had a problem I had to work it out myself rather than putting it on someone else because that's how it's supposed to be. He gave up after I said that.