Selling Religion

I was reading an article on the World Wide Web when there came a gentle knock at my front door. I looked outside and saw two well-dressed young men at my door. I noticed they carried Bibles. Lovely. And, yawn. I haven’t talked to Bible-toters at my front door since, well, last week.

Last week two men came to my door and one of them pounded on it like he wanted to bust right through it. “Holy crap, man, don’t break down my door,” was my instant thought. It annoyed me. I do have a doorbell but rarely do people use it. When I stepped through the door one of the men shoved a pamphlet into my hand; Are You Going To Heaven? it demanded to know. I glanced at it and then reached out and stuck it in his shirt pocket and went back inside my house. Usually they just leave a doorknob hanger and move on. Sometimes they wedge printed material between my storm door and doorframe. But these guys wanted to chat.

There came another gentle knock at my door. I opened the door and stepped outside. The two young men wore long sleeve dress shirts and neckties. It was a swelteringly hot day.

The young man closest to me asked me if I thought there would ever be a time when there would be no suffering on Earth. I answered, “No.” I guess that makes me a glass half-empty kind of guy. But heck, it’s a big world with billions of people. Somebody, somewhere, sometime, is going to be suffering about something. The young man opened his Bible and began reading from the book of Revelation. I listened for a minute, then I asked a question. The conversation went like this:

“Who wrote what you’re reading?” I asked.

At first he seemed stumped but eventually came up with, “It was written by John!”

“John who?” I asked.

“Uh, I don’t remember his last name.”

He shouldn’t feel bad. No one knows who wrote Revelation. Most Christians associate Revelation’s author (Saint John the Divine) with the man who wrote the Gospel of John (John the Apostle), but religious scholars have concluded that the two books were written by different men.

“So,” I continued, “a guy named John – and that’s all you know about him – wrote a book two thousand years ago, and you believe every word in it is true. Why?”

“It’s in the Bible.”

“How do you know everything in the Bible is true?” I asked. I wasn’t suggesting it was not true. I just wanted to know why he believed it was true. Sometimes when I’m bored I like to play the devil’s advocate. It makes things more interesting.

“There are places in the Bible that they’ve found actually existed,” he said.

“Ever heard of a movie called Philadelphia Story?” I asked. “Philadelphia is a real place, but that doesn’t mean the movie is about real events,” I said.

“The Bible makes prophecies,” the young man offered.

“What prophecies?” I asked.

“Earthquakes,” the other young man said.

“Earthquakes have happened as long as the earth has existed,” I said. “In fact, I predict there will be an earthquake next year. Am I a prophet?”

“The Bible predicts shortages of food,” he tried again.

“Ah. Famine. That’s something that’s never happened before,” I said. I changed the topic. “Do you know what the word bible means?”

They didn’t.

“It means a collection of books. The Bible was written by many people in many different times and places. Do you know how many creation stories there are in Genesis?”

They were befuddled by the question. After a few seconds of silence I told them, “Genesis has two creation stories. And one is much older than the other.”

At that point he declared he didn’t want to argue with me and they turned to leave.

“It’s a hot day,” I told them. “Be careful. Take care of yourselves. I don’t want to see you have a heat stroke and fall over.”

They got into a white SUV with dark tinted windows that had been waiting for them, engine idling, at my curb. “Air conditioned, that’s good,” I thought. “They need to cool down between house visits.”

I went back inside my house and returned to my computer. If you’re going to try to sell me something, you’d better know more about what you’re selling than I do. That’s usually not the way it works out, though.