mormons pass by
This afternoon confirms it:
Mormons have some kind of list of which houses NOT to stop at; they will pass you by when they are out doing their missionary thing.
From the corner window, I saw two young guys in the white shirts and the ties walking up the block towards my sidewalk. Then they passed by and went up to the next house.
I assume it’s because I engaged the last pair of Mormon missionaries with questions: why no one ever told them the truth about old Joe Smith who was a conman arrested twice in New York before he invented Mormonism, why a supposed divinely-inspired text would be full of untruths about Native Americans, how old Joe Smith’s doctrine of religious polygamy was an attempt to bamboozle people who thought he was immoral for marrying several young girls …
I also assume they reported my questions back to their mission leader and he (well, it would be a he, wouldn’t it, knowing Mormon views of women in leadership) must have put my address on a no-go list to avoid the chance that I might contaminate the faith of a future Mormon.
Poor kids. They are lied to their whole lives. Poor me, I missed my chance to enlighten a couple of ‘em.
LOL They absolutely do X your house. My dad was a shift worker and they once woke him up about 30 minutes after he’d gone to bed. He answered the door, naked as the day he was born and furious, and threatened to strangle them all with their ties. They never ever returned–and my parents lived in that house for 25 years.
oh lord what a great story! Glad I wasn’t there to see it, though 🍑
Piling on:
I lived for a while in a communal household with a bunch of people who rescued animals, and for a while we had this incredibly sweet Burmese python named Dolores that we were caring for. She rebounded from neglect very quickly and was basically a joyful and energetic bundle of sunshine, but she’d had mites and they were hard to get rid of. Treatment includes coating the snake with olive oil and waiting an hour, which causes the mites to suffocate. Now, it’s not a good idea to put an eleven-foot long greased snake into a glass habitat, so the best bet was to hold her for the hour. This was a formidable task, as Dolores weighed almost seventy pounds, but as i am a robust and muscular individual i stripped down to my underpants, picked up Dolores, and went about my business in a very slippery and greasy way (i was test-fitting new fangs for halloween).
Which was when the mormons stopped by. My housemates had seen them from the front windows, which was why they insisted i answer the door.
Me, befanged, mohawked, tattooed, pierced, greased, naked except for a ripped and sagging pair of drawers and an enthusiastic and friendly seventy-pound oily snake: hi!
Dolores, who was really having such an awesome day: new friends? yes? hello? you have treats?
Mormons: sorry wrong house. (they actually turned whiter i did not think that would have been possible)
Me (to housemates): keep an eye out for the assembly of god folks, okay? we might as well do this right.
One of my SCA buddies was dressed to go to an event when the Mormons knocked. He answered the door in his black, hooded cloak, long knife strapped on, and then looked back and called, “Brothers! The sacrifices have arrived!”
As you might imagine, those were the last Mormons he ever saw at that house.
Not as dramatic as the above stories, but my stepdad was once moving into a 2nd story apartment and the Mormons dropped by. My stepdad, always on the hunt for an opportunity to be “a cheap bastard,” asked if they’d help him move his couch up the staircase. To their credit, they did help move the couch … but strangely enough he never got visited by the Mormons ever again after that day.
Wasn’t present for this as it happened before my birth, but it’s something of a family legend.
It was springtime during the years where my grandfather was making a go at being a farmer again, post retirement from the telephone company. Part of this was raising goats, so there were many baby goats bouncing around.
My grandparents had also just gotten a load of gravel delivered with the intent of covering the driveway with it. That hadn’t happened yet but the family children had leveled off a sort of plateau in the big pile while playing.
Enter the Jehovah’s Witnesses.
My mom was tasked with restraining Grandma’s gangster dogs, Clyde, Mugsy, and Ralph who were all offering to chase off the intruders very vocally. This landed my mom a front row seat for what went down next.
Grandma Sharon listens to the whole pitch very enthusiastically, smiling and nodding along. Eventually they get to the end and ask if she would like to attend services with them.
“Oh we’d love to,” she replied with her best, most innocent of smiles. “And in return we’d like you to come worship with us! We’re sacrificing a goat to Diana at the full moon!” And she swept her arm out to point at the impromptu rock pile alter.
As my mom says, “never saw two people leave so fast. And they never came back.”
Alas, I was never willing to do more than just explain I had a morman relative, was pagan, had read the book, and had no interest in converting. But should you want to be taken off the list, Mormons are told not to talk to people that have no interest in converting and are inclined to debate Christian theory, Mormonism, or really anything that might inspire doubt in the missionaries.
Onetime a couple of LDS missionaries came to my flat and I… don’t think I was that weird at them? I think I was wearing a blue & white vintage batik kaftan and maybe the place lowkey smelled of weed, but I was hyperfocused on comparative religion that month so I opened the door like “OMG are you guys Mormons? That’s awesome! I’ve been hoping you’d show up I want to know all about your religion and I didn’t know how to get in touch with you! Can I have a copy of your book? Do you want to come in?!” and they gave me a copy of their book (I never did get around to reading it), made an appointment to come back another day, and apparently blacklisted my place on the spot because I never saw them again.
Which was frankly a little bit rude of them.
so a former roommate had (British?) penal orange overalls, from dressing as Nathan from Misfits for Dragoncon one year, as an excuse to shout profanity. after the con, he wore the thing as pjs pretty often, and answered the door to greet a family of Jehovah’s Witnesses in it at least once.
my roommate @decoplusboco usually talks to missionaries because comparative religion fan i guess
the one time i answered the door for someone who wanted to talk to me about jesus, it went something like
them: Hi! We noticed you moved in recently! Have you thought about attending [some church]
me, standing on a skull doormat, wearing all black with a prominent ankh ring: uhhhh no i. i wasnt thinking about that.
this is not counting the multiple times i thought girls were hitting on me at work when i was a barista and they were actually leading up to inviting me to church or telling me about jesus. you’d think this wouldn’t be an easy thing to mix up but
look, when a girl slides you a napkin with her number and “Call me! :) “ written on it, i dont think im out of line in assuming she’s flirting. AND YET.
My mother got our house X’d when I was a kid. She accepted their free copy of the book of Mormon. They saw a plump little lady. She invited them to come back for tea a week later.
That was all the time she needed to read it and make a list of every theological and other contradiction in it. She took those poor guys apart.
People thought my mother had a degree in education or music because she was a music teacher. Or they thought she didn’t have one at all because of her appearance and manner.
What my mother actually had…
…was a degree in theology.
This wasn’t the only time she weaponized it against what she used to call “evan-jellyfish”
My roommates are Witnesses and they’re pretty cool, but man oh man, I cannot WAIT to encounter a Mormon in the wild.
I’m Jewish.
With a whole bookshelf of histories and anthologies.
Let’s see if I can scare them off not just from the house but the NEIGHBORHOOD.
(via curiousfrenchgirl)
