Door to door religious opportunism

Yesterday was a mostly productive day. I spent the morning in the greenhouse cleaning up, removing dead plants and planning. I also planted baby bok choy and various lettuces where the herbs had been in summer.

In the afternoon I moved to the garden removing weeds from the new lawn. Not fun as one has to bend down again and again. Then the intercom rang. That means the dogs start barking, I have to run inside to get the keys to the gates (which were in the kitchen), then run back outside to open the gates with three insane animals jumping around me in a frenzy as if the most exciting thing in the world is about to happen. Once I opened the gate, a friendly looking older woman asked a teenager to hand me this pamphlet:

It says “Will the suffering stop one day”, then you get a picture of a woman who looks like she’s got a migraine, and below a multiple choice of yes, no or maybe. My reaction was the usual reaction when unknown people come to the door or call: “We already support a number of charities, so I’m not sure how much we can give you. Who do you work for? Do you provide the tax credit certificate…” I’ve got the whole speech memorized.

Then the woman asks to come inside because she would like to talk about my suffering. My suffering? Twilight zone moment. Then the teenager says, “God doesn’t like suffering or injustice.”- and then she jumped in with the bible this and that. They were Jehovah’s Witnesses. I had the urge to say something unpleasant like, hey lady, it’s a workday and I’m in my garden with my dogs, while you’re going door to door, which one of us is suffering in that scenario? But I just excused myself and closed the gate.

It’s just an obscenity. They go door to door preying on people who might be suffering. The more I thought about it, the more it annoyed me. And the boy, he was only about 14 years old. Instead of enjoying his adolescence he’s made to participate in this vile scam. Appalling. There should be some sort of atheist sign one could put on a door/gate to make sure those people stay away.