I went to junior high and high school in a small town on the Oregon coast called Bandon. I lived there, too, during the first two years that I attended the local community college, which was nearly thirty miles to the north in Coos Bay. As is frequently true in small, isolated towns in America, the town of Bandon is stuffed with more than its fair share of ignorant, self-important, hypocritical proselytes. In Bandon, as in most other small American towns, the lack of knowledge displayed by these proselytes in no way impedes their faith that they are to be congratulated for being born into the One True Religion, while everyone who differs from them on the smallest point of theology is to be excoriated for failing to be born into said True Religion.
Sadly, in Bandon as in other towns around the States, lack of intelligence and articulateness are often inversely proportional to the degree of zealotry shown by a proselyte. At least once a week, and frequently more often, I confronted people outside my door who, convinced that they were well-meaning individuals, wasted a great deal of my time, raised my blood pressure rapidly, and insulted me, both to my face and behind my back. Apparently, the fact that it was known that I had once been a Christian made me particularly tempting bait for these proselytes—because, as Jesus points out, he's happier to have one stray sheep return to the flock then one hundred (or is it ninety-nine?) remain without leaving in the first place. Make no mistake about it: I was recognized as being a tasty prize in that favorite game of door-to-door missionaries, Numbers for Jesus.
At first, I tried to hold calm and rational conversations with these people. (I even used to invite them in for coffee, in the hope that we could have a pleasant and interesting conversation.) Sadly, I slowly realized that every one of these people who came to my door was simply a zealot. They weren't interested in having a discussion, they simply wanted me to be blinded by the white light so that they could move on and bag the next convert. I found that, without exception, every one of them had been born into their religion and had received some kind of (formal or informal) theological training without ever thinking critically about any of its precepts or presuppositions. For this reason, they were essentially unable to justify their beliefs: They simply insisted that they were obviously true and/or the inevitable result of the obvious truth of the bible. Circular arguments, ad hominem attacks, red herrings, old rumors, and appeals to pity (and to the people) abounded in their discourse. The proselytes refused to acknowledge that their dogmas had a particular history, and insisted that their particular interpretation of the bible (as, apparently, the bible itself) had simply dropped from heaven, twenty centuries ago, and existed, gleaming, spit-polished, and unchanged, to the present day.
Me: What makes you think that a being called
Godexists?Proselyte 1: Because the Bible says so.
Me: And what makes you think that you can trust that what the bible says is true?
Proselyte 2: Because it's the word of God!
I eventually realized that there was no point talking to these people, and started asking them not to come back any more. It was at this point that many of them got nasty. (Apparently, as long as I was engaging in a dialogue with them, I was still in some sort of theological no-man's-land from which I could be plucked by the brave soldier in God's army—that is, whoever was on my doorstep demanding that I attend church with him or her. Once I stopped talking to them, though, I was the Enemy again. I've come to the conclusion that, for most proselytes, those not members of their sect are not even really human, but mere counters in a cosmic struggle that they're trying to help their god win.) I specifically asked people to stop coming back; in some cases, I warned them that I would regard further contacts from them as a form of harassment and take legal action. They continued to come by, often very early or very late, because they were—as they claimed—concerned about my salvation.
How little Christianity educates the sense of honesty and justice can be seen pretty well from the writings of its scholars: they advance their conjectures as blandly as dogmas and are hardly ever honestly perplexed by the exegesis of a Biblical verse. Again and again they say,I am right, for it is written,and the interpretation that follows is of such impudent arbitrariness that a philologist is stopped in his tracks, torn between anger and laughter, and keeps asking himself: Is it possible? Is this honest? Is it even decent?
—Friederich Nietzsche, The Dawn
I tried everything to get rid of these people. I asked them politely not to come back. I threatened legal action. I put up a sign on the door informing them that I was uninterested in becoming a member of their religion. I emptied buckets of water onto my porch from a second-story window when they rang the doorbell. I acted crazy. I called the police. I let the dog out. I pretended not to be home. I answered the door, naked under an improperly closed robe, when a family with young children came by and woke me up early in the morning. I turned the hose on them. I played sound recordings of gunshots when they rang the doorbell. I made vague statements about my life that they interpreted in extravagant and and unlicensed (but not unexpected, given Christianity's perverse fascination with the perverse) ways.
And then, one day, right after accidentally
leaving my robe open to scare off that family of Jehovah's Witnesses (who were repeat offenders for whom I had no sympathy, after I'd asked them politely never to come back), it hit me. They want to talk to me because, to them, I'm a resource, not a person. (To the majority of proselytes, people
means Christians,
a term which is narrowly defined to mean members of my own sect.
) In their view, it's unfair of me to deny them my time, because to them, I'm not exercising my right, as a free human being, to dispose of my time as I see fit—rather, by refusing to talk to them, I'm unfairly depriving them of an opportunity to get brownie points with Jesus. (This is why they were ringing my doorbell at midnight, bringing their children to get pity points with me, etc.) And, on the rare occasions that I did persuade someone to stop coming by and bothering me, I simply had to deal with someone else from the same church soon afterward. They were like swarming flies.
Obviously, I felt that I had to take some sort of drastic measures. They felt that I was being unreasonable and had to come to a compromise. Something had to give, either on their end or on mine.
Now, to them, it seemed fair that I offer them at least some limited access to my time. (After all, they'd tell me, my life belongs to Jesus in the first place, whether or not I've accepted him as my personal savior, and as his representatives, they can legitimately dispose of segments of it. The restraint they were exercising by not torturing and murdering me for my heterodoxy, like their ancestors would have, was a mere politeness, not a principled stand based on a theory of human rights.) Since there was obviously nothing I could do to make them stop pestering me out of hand, I decided to set conditions under which I would consider entering into a dialogue with these people. So, after being awakened early in the morning and frightening off a family of JWs (that is, Jehovah's Witnesses
), I walked upstairs, booted my computer, and typed out a list of all of the objections that I had to Christianity that I could think of offhand. (There were about 150.) I phrased each problem in the form of a question, mainly because I'd been dreaming that I was on a popular game show—you know which one I'm talking about—when the JWs had awakened me. All told, it took about four hours, including the time that I spent consulting my notes and the books on my shelves. After breaking for a brief lunch, I walked back upstairs and typed an introduction, which gave a brief explanation of my own history of association with the Christian religion and explained that the document voiced my primary objections to it. I told the potential reader of the document that I would consider entering into a dialogue if and only if the reader could answer the questions to my satisfaction. I also set some parameters for answers that would be considered acceptable, especially regarding length, content, and methodology. I printed out about ten copies the next day, when I was at school (this was in the heady, naïve days when colleges offered students free printing), and kept them near my front door. When a proselyte rang my doorbell, I politely thanked them for their interest, explained that I had some problems with the Christian religion, and handed them a copy, telling them that they should read the instructions carefully. When I ran out of printed copies, I printed some more off at school.
It worked like a charm. Once I'd given a proselyte a copy of the Questionnaire, I never saw him or her at my front door again. After a month, word had gotten around the local proselyte community, and I didn't get any new proselytes, either. I could sleep in again.
Apparently, these people were concerned enough about the salvation of my soul that they were willing to risk the hose, the dog, the police, and the chance that the elementary-school-aged children they'd dragged along might see me half naked to preach at me, and were concerned enough to override my own objections about being the object of proselytization, but were not so concerned about me that they were willing to keep coming to my door if they would actually have to, like, write, and stuff, or think, or do any other intellectual-type work. It seems that there are easier ways to play Numbers for Jesus than by answering 153 questions.
So I told my heathen friends about my (so far unnamed) questionnaire. They were elated; living in a small town means that everyone who's not a part of the mainstream gets inundated with these people, and has to deal with them over and over. A questionnaire that acts as a magic talisman by forcing proselytes to, like, do research, and stuff—or any other talisman with the same effect, for that matter—was a prize possession. Soon my friends were enjoying sleep-filled mornings, too, thanks to the questionnaire, and I thought, Wouldn't it be neat if this helped more people to escape from the clutches of (self-professed) well-meaning proselytes?
So I sent it off to the Why Christians Suck site, asking them if they'd be willing to post it, and, if so, if they'd be willing to attribute it to the pseudonym I chose, The Heirophant.
I picked a pseudonym because of the stories told on the WCS website about hate mail and death threats; I chose that particular pseudonym because I'd been listening to a lot of Marilyn Manson since I'd attended the concert in Salem, mentioned in the questionnaire, about a month and a half earlier, and one of the cycles of songs on the Antichrist Superstar album is called The Heirophant.
As it turned out, the stories of death threats to writers on the WCS site were hardly exaggerated; they passed my share of hate mail on to me, and it was the same as the typically unbalanced, vague threats I was later to receive about my religion-related papers on my web site.
The Why Christians Suck page also added the following disclaimer, due to the amount of idiot mail they were receiving:
Actually,heirophantis spelled correctly here. There are two spellings:hierophantis the common English spelling,heirophantis the common spelling among those knowledgeable of the occult and is the spelling used by Arthur Waite.
As I pointed out above, I used the spelling from the back of the Marilyn Manson album. (You may want to look up the word heirophant
in the dictionary under the spelling hierophant or heirophant.) I am not knowledgable of the occult,
and have not read Arthur Waite.
Eventually, the Why Christians Suck page moved from paranoia.com to hemisfear.com, then disappeared completely (and damn, I miss them—although some of the better papers that used to be on that site can still be found floating around on the Internet, and the Internet wayback machine preserves much of their content), taking the HPQ with it. The HPQ, though, continued to float around on the net in one form and another (which is fine with me; it explicitly grants permission for non-profit reproduction). Now that I'm making so many changes to my web site, though, I wanted to give it a permanent home. I now live in a state that's less rabidly fundamentalist, so I'm not as concerned about death threats anymore, and I don't mind that it's connected to me.
Enjoy it and make as much use of it as you can.
Go back to the home page for the Heirophant's Proselytizer Questionnaire.