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RE: Door knocking
September 17, 2019 at 6:28 pm
(September 17, 2019 at 3:28 pm)The Valkyrie Wrote: (September 16, 2019 at 3:04 pm)BrianSoddingBoru4 Wrote: I had a pair of Druids come to my door once. Lovely people, stopped by to invite me to some seasonal ritual of theirs. I didn't go, but read about it the next day. Sounded like fun.
Boru
See, if I could get druids coming around and they guaranteed an occasional human sacrifice, I’d probably go.
NZ/Oz need a good supply of bog bodies..
I can't disagree, but these were technically neo-Druids - all about harmony, reverence for the human spirit, peaceful coexistence, and other assorted rubbish.
Boru
‘But it does me no injury for my neighbour to say there are twenty gods or no gods. It neither picks my pocket nor breaks my leg.’ - Thomas Jefferson
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RE: Door knocking
September 17, 2019 at 8:00 pm
(September 17, 2019 at 6:28 pm)BrianSoddingBoru4 Wrote: (September 17, 2019 at 3:28 pm)The Valkyrie Wrote: See, if I could get druids coming around and they guaranteed an occasional human sacrifice, I’d probably go.
NZ/Oz need a good supply of bog bodies..
I can't disagree, but these were technically neo-Druids - all about harmony, reverence for the human spirit, peaceful coexistence, and other assorted rubbish.
Boru
Oh.
The sort who should become bog bodies...
Dying to live, living to die.
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RE: Door knocking
September 18, 2019 at 7:39 am
As others have stated, I think they truly believe they're doing "the lord's work." Even if they die, never convincing a single soul to convert, they died trying, and in their minds, god will see their value as a good little Christian and send them on up to heaven.
If you're frightened of dying, and you're holding on, you'll see devils tearing your life away. But if you've made your peace, then the devils are really angels, freeing you from the Earth.
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RE: Door knocking
September 18, 2019 at 7:50 pm
(This post was last modified: September 18, 2019 at 7:51 pm by mordant.)
The JWs and Mormons, of course, really flog this and you're a fourth-class citizen of the community at best if you don't uphold these imperatives of going door to door. This is an artifact of their minority status within the religious world, and their desire, despite not subscribing to the traditional Christian creeds, to be considered Christians. They desperately want to grow their numbers, any way they can.
In the evangelical world I come from, door to door visitation was something a very few did, and there were occasional half-hearted efforts to shame the rest of us into it, but it never reached critical mass. We used indirect means sometimes, such as busing children to Sunday School and promoting that and things like Vacation Bible School and release-time classes as fun events where they can give parents a break in exchange for indoctrinating their little ones, and if the kids keep coming or wanting to come, they hopefully drag their parents along eventually.
In most of the rest of Protestantism and Catholicism, cold-call proselytization is exceedingly rare. It is more a cultural pull, and sometimes, as in the case of state religions, there would be a mixture of piety with public policy.
Recently I've been reading between the lines of these little communities in places like Italy and Ireland that are putting out incentives for people to move to these areas that are struggling to keep their population from shrinking, and what you find is that they don't just want you to move in and mind your own business, they want you to be "community oriented" or some other euphemism for participating in the prevailing religious education and observance. Even when it's not overtly in the pitch I would be unsurprised to find it in the practice.
So it goes, there are a million ways to compel conformance and discourage deviance. Overtly awkward practices like door to door calling is just one of them, and not the most common, either.
