Last week I noticed a pile of pamphlets in the ladies room of the gym I go to work out. Curious I went to see what they were about and was shocked to see a christian cross with the title "Where do you think you go when you die?" on the front page. Yuck, I thought, you can't even go to the gym without them trying to get you.
I walked away thinking about those poor wretched people who need comfort for something we can't escape from anyway.
Yesterday I found myself in the same situation and there was one pamphlet left. One single pamphlet there to poison someones mind. First I looked around to make sure I wasn't being watched, then I stuffed it into my purse. Furtively I crept out of the bathroom to a large garbage bin outside and tossed the offending material into the trash where it belonged. Success! I felt so much better although my work is just beginning. I have a feeling I'll have to do this often.
Updates will be posted as they happen.
8 comments:
I have done that before too, shoot, I have thrown away the whole stack.
I have also taken and thrown away the gideon bible in hotels too.
I do kinda feel bad that I am killing trees because you know they are just going to print more and put them back.
Send them to me! :)
I collect those religious pamphlets because the most idiotic things ever said sometimes crop up into those. I love it! Sometimes I pull out my stack of religious tracts and have a good laugh.
Tone, I've written things in gideon bibles like "Don't believe in this stupid shit." Or something on that order.
Travis, I'll be there tomorrow and will check out the ladies room for more pamphlets. If there are any there I'll save one for you and we'll talk!
Summer
There was a JW lady that used to come to my old job (a bus station) and put copies of The Watchtower and some other JW publication on the counter for anyone to grab. I never stopped or threw them away. The most I would do is say hi to her. In fact, my boss, who was an Evangelist Christian, was more likely to throw them away than I was.
Sometimes I'd even pick one up and read a few pages. The information in it was very presumptuous and played on people's supposed "inner decency" (after working at that bus station, I can tell you that there are very few people with even the grasp of what decency is). It was good for a few laughs. Ironically, these magazines helped push me from spiritual agnostic to flat out atheism. There were a few fundamental morals in the magazine that I might agree with (just like the Bible) but it was so disconnected from the actual religion that it's just as well that you remove the religion from the formula entirely. Unfortunately, not everybody thinks this way.
But that doesn't mean people don't have a right to share their beliefs. The ladies that distributed these magazines wasn't shoving them down anyone's throat as dogma and she had every right to display them (she at first asked my permission to put them on the counter and after a while I told her it wasn't necessary to ask). It was something very different than a person standing at a public podium and hassling people.
I used to love reading the jehovah's pamphlets when I was a kid...don't know exactly why though. I never thought of throwing those away in waiting rooms.
Excellent! Have you thought of complaining to the gym management? Or, in the interests of fair play, asking where you can leave your atheist pamphlets? You don't have to have any -- just watching their reaction can be entertaining.
Most recently I wrote a disclaimer in Gideon's bible. soemthing to the effect of "This book is fictional, characters and events are fictional and any resemblance to personages living or dead is pure coincidence"
I also wore my "Godless" shirt to a born again rally.
Some of my favorite blogging topics are inspired by nutty things I get in the mail from various Christian groups like "America Needs Fatima" and the "Wycliffe Associates", who need to raise almost $900,000 so that they can buy a new plane for all of these Bible translators working in Papua New Guinea.
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