Witness this!

Jenn received a piece of mail today. Or, perhaps I should say a piece of mail came to our mailbox today, addressed to Jenn or "current resident." Inside was a single-page, hand-written note, inviting her to read and respond to the enclosed bible tract, which had been carefully cut from a booklet of similar tracts published by the Jehovah's Witnesses.

As you realize, if you've been reading my blog for a while, both Jenn and I are atheist. We eschew religion. Indeed, we find religion to be all but evil in many ways, but that is beside the point at the moment.

I cannot but wonder whether this is a new tactic being employed by the Witlesses, er, Jehovah's Witnesses, mindful of the quip often attributed to George Carlin that the USPS should hand over final delivery duties to the Jehovah's Witnesses to save time and money.

It also reminds me of a story from my early days in my apartment in Old Louisville:

I had recently moved in to the apartment building, called "The Cavalier," on Fourth just north of Ormsby. One sunny Saturday morning, about nine, my doorbell rang. Despite having gotten home only a couple hours before (I was working for UPS as a ramp rat at the time, loading airplanes, and got off work around six on Saturday mornings), I tumbled out of bed, found some sweat pants and a t-shirt, and was putting them on as I stumbled down the stairs to see who had come to visit me in my then fairly-new-to-me digs (there was one exterior door where the doorbell buttons were, serving six apartments on three floors--I was on the second floor, meaning I had to descend three half-flights of stairs).

When I reached the exterior door, I found a man and a woman wishing to chat. "Hi! I'm Fred, and this is Ethel, and we are from the Kingdom Hall a few blocks down Fourth Street. We'd like to discuss..."

"NO, I'm not interested in your god!" I interrupted, as I turned around and stalked back up the stairs to resume my slumber.

I hadn't learned my lesson, though. A couple weeks later, around the same time on a Saturday morning, my doorbell rang again. Again, I tumbled out of bed, pulled on the same pair of sweat pants, and stumbled down the stairs while pulling on a t-shirt, to find...

"Hi! I'm Barney, and this is Betty, and we're from Kingdom Hall a few blocks down Fourth Street."

Before they could continue, I interrupted them, saying, "Is this the first doorbell anyone has answered this morning? I heard that one of my neighbors is into the occult. I read up on the cult he's rumored to follow, and they do human sacrifice-like stuff. They are supposedly VERY fond of using Jehovah's Witnesses for their ritual sacrifices."

"Barney" and "Betty" were looking at me with, between them, one eye, as one sees in cartoons. Yep, one great big eye, with four little tiny dots in the middle that would have been their pupils.

I lived in that apartment for another ten or twelve years, and never once got another doorbell ring from Jehovah's Witnesses.