Often, I notice people looking for the exits when I am talking to them, like maybe they can slip out without my noticing. This doesn’t serve me well in regular life, but it does come in handy when confronting people who are selling religion door-to-door…
It’s two o’clock on a brilliant September afternoon. I am about half-way through mowing the lawn with the electric mower (powered by wind and low-impact hydro). I had been noticing two young men - in black pants, white shirts and black ties – working their way up our street for a couple of minutes now. These guys were selling religion door-to-door; Mormons, by the looks of ‘em.
As I bent over to remove the safety thingy that keeps wandering kids from activating our mower, I noticed one of the guys separate from his partner and walk towards me. They had been harassing a kid on a bike. He might have been an international student.
I had my earplugs in (safety almost first!) but I could hear his chipper volleys of “Sir, sir, have you heard the… Sir, sir, have you ever read the…”, and so on.
I moved kind of lazily and acted like I didn’t hear him as he approached. When he came within normal conversation range, I straightened up and slowly removed the little earplugs.
“Pardon me?”, I asked in my very best easy-going folksy tone.
The chipper little missionary brightened up and asked me again, “Have you heard of the Book of Mormon?”.
I kicked the grass-catching bag to see if it needed to be emptied. It didn’t.
“Yes,” I said, “yes, I do believe I have.”
At this point, I needed to walk a quarter-way around the house to unplug the extension cord and reconnect it so as to service the back yard.
This had me walking back towards his partner who had just then finished-up with the bewildered cyclist.
The pair of them began to follow me up the front steps of the house. I told them that they could wait there, “’cause I was jus’ gunna switch the plug”.
The plug to pull was just inside the door, but it gave me a few seconds to think of the next thing to say.
When I came out again, they commented about it being a nice day for doing the lawn. I think one of them might have even used the word “glorious.”
Anyway.
One of them asked me if I thought a lot about god. I was carrying the cord around back so I looked over my shoulder to reply.
“Sure, all the time.”, I said.
The first whiteshirt looked quite hopeful at this point.
I went on, “Yeah, only thing is, I hear voices.”
“Voices?”, they asked in monotheistic unison.
“…all the time,” I continued, “How can I tell which ones are from god?”
Mormon number two asked me what the voices said. I told him that they were mostly Beatles lyrics. This elicited a “That’s cool!” from one of them. I couldn’t tell which, my back was to them.
They caught up with me again when I stopped to open the gate into the backyard.
That’s when I told them that the voices also told me to do things – that, “at first I thought it was just my crappy stereo and used 45’s, but with the introduction of CD’s, and now MP3’s, the voices were still there”.
“How can I tell which of the messages are from god?”, I asked.
It was like I had hit a switch, the first Mormon lit up. “The ones that tell you to do good things”. I think he might have even added, “of course”.
I was kinda shagged after cutting the front yard and city property, so I took a moment to lean on the fence and take a breath. “But if god created everything,” I pondered, “you know – if he’s the Alpha and the Omega – the origin of the universe, then he created evil too. Who am I to refuse an evil deed? God created evil, and I know that god never does anything bad, so evil can’t be bad.”
Only now did any sort of look of alarm cross either of their faces.
One said that he knew that the bible didn’t mention anything about god creating Evil. I told him that it was in the bible that god had created Evil, “along with all the other things”.
The other one said that it didn’t say anything about god creating Evil anywhere in the bible. The other one said that he didn’t “believe” it did. I pointed them in turn and said, “well, you are wrong and you are a liar. I don’t take much truck with either of you.”, and went through the back gate in search of an electrical outlet. I plugged the extension cord in the same spot as we use for the pond and wandered back towards the gate.
The monochromatic duo was still there.
“Have you heard the word of the book of Mormon?”
“Yeah,” I was feeling a little pissy now, on account of them lying about that god making Evil not being in the bible thing, “I know about Joseph Smith and his magic golden plates. I also read the first two books. I’m sure in there god says somewhere that he is The Word. Like he is the bible. Why would anyone presume to come along with another book? Are you saying god didn’t get it right the first time?”
A look was exchanged.
I went on.
“Besides, there’s a lot of stuff in the bible that didn’t happen.”
One of them smiled broadly and asked, “Yeah, like what?”
“Like the whole everyone going back to their home town to pay taxes. The only accounts of this are from biblical sources. I think it’s in Luke somewhere.
But nowhere in the actual historical record do they mention that that particular Caesar did any such thing. And those Romans loved to write stuff down. They wrote down everything. My mom’s got a recipe for Roman bread.
Have you ever wondered why the Egyptians never bothered to write a jot about all their Jewish slaves and the whole exodus debacle? That’s because it never happened. Egyptian farmers built the pyramids on the off-season. It’s all part of the actual historic record.
There’s no historic proof that this Jesus guy ever existed”.
“Of course there is,” one of them answered as they both chuckled, “we base time on his birth.”
It was my turn to laugh.
The first one raised a finger and spoke.
“But I agree with you about the Jews.”, he said.
For some reason, this pissed me off just a little bit.
“You know what Joseph Smith was known for before he and his brother dug up those golden plates?”
The two looked as if they prayed that this was going to be some kind of good-clean knock-knock joke.
I went on.
“For spending time in jail on account of his selling things that did not belong to him and convincing other people to give him their money.”
They asked me where I had read this, and I said that it was in books older than theirs: the ledgers of the county clerks who processed his prosecution. “All of the court documents are years older than the book of Mormon.”
“He was a con-man”, I said.
This is the point when that look completely overtook them. They were scoping-out the exits – looking for an escape route.
I tried to do my best Captain Mal Reynolds, but came out somewhere between John Wayne and Catherine Hepburn. I wanted to maintain my folksy cool, but my voice wavered a little because I had let these two actually annoy me.
“Have a coffee, smoke a joint – sit down and have a beer.”, I recommended, “Think for yourselves, it’s not too late.”
At this point, they totally disengaged and began to walk away. I could just hear them consoling one another that, “That guy had obviously never read the bible…” before I popped the earplugs in again.
There was more lawn to get through.
