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I had a visit from a pair of those door-to-door God salespeople this morning. I don't remember which group it was, but we'll go ahead and assume Jehovas Witnesses without loss of generality.

The thing about these people is that they are very nice. Almost ludicrously so. I mean, they're basically spending a lot of their time trying to save you and me from an eternity in Hell. Even if you think they're wrong you have to appreciate what they're trying to do for you. They can be a bit persistent but wouldn't you be if someone said "I don't have time to save my eternal soul; I'm in the middle of breakfast"?

So given that they're not so much bad people as just very very odd, and because I had a few minutes to wait for my brother to drive into college, I spoke to them for a minute or so. I don't think they were accustomed to my response.

I didn't tear into them to the degree that I could have. Instead I answered their questions directly and succinctly. I'm used to my religious debates happening in a non-real-time medium so some of my answers weren't, let's say, complete. "Why don't you believe in God?" they asked. I said, "lack of evidence", which is correct. But I should have mentioned the God-hypothesis's lack of explanatory power, Occam's razor, and Russel's teapot. "How do you think we got here?" they asked. I said, "evolution". I was hoping to be pressed on it; I wanted to refute some common anti-evolution myths, maybe touch on abiogenesis. A segue into cosmology would've been entertaining I think.

Unfortunately I had to leave, so the claim to fame of converting JWs to atheism is still beyond me. I'll manage it some day.

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