We're in ur office... proselytizing ur minions.

Several months ago I endured a period wherein every two or three weeks, the Jehovah's Witnesses would show up and leave stuff at my door. Apparently, I wasn't the only one they were having trouble reaching, because today.... they showed up at my office.

A lady came in shortly after 1pm asking to leave some pamphlets for us. She was steered toward our Executive Director who politely took the pamphlet, and when she left, promptly put it in the garbage. I asked to see what she left (I think it's good to know what superstitious mumbo-jumbo people are spreading), so she fished it out of the garbage for me.

This sparked a short friendly conversation about the Jehovah's Witnesses between her and I, and then just a little later a much longer and extremely interesting group conversation with most of the rest of the office (it's a small office) on religion in general. Thankfully, nobody in the office is too hard core about their personal beliefs, so it was a very congenial conversation with each person in turn sharing their own personal world views.

I even got to ask the one Catholic about her beliefs regarding the eucharist in reference to The Ongoing Cracker Kerfuffle. Her position was that she has trouble getting her head around the idea that the cracker literally turns into the body of christ (in fact, the idea kinda grosses her out), and that she thinks most of today's younger catholics probably feel the same. It's the older Catholics, in her opinion, that really buy into it.

Oddly, it was the Taoist (one of those interesting facts that the conversation revealed) in the group that seemed the most opposed to someone taking the cracker without eating it. The consensus between the Taoist and the Catholic seemed to be that, if you're going to voluntarily walk into a church during services, then you should respect their traditions and rituals. I didn't really have a good rebuttal to that. But they also seemed to agree that the responses from the church involved in The Cracker Kerfuffle, the Catholic League's Response, and the responses from multitudes of good xians, was also an overreaction.

Anyway, it was a fascinating workplace conversation, inadvertently instigated by the Jehovah's Witnesses, so I guess they're inadvertently good for something. For those keeping score... 1 Catholic, 1 Taoist, 2 "Not even a little smidgen" Nonbelievers, and 1 abstention.