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.
all that is needed to make these religious groups stop & actually campaign for a law against is simple
1. create a open honest scientific & educational group, & have it legally become a religion.
2. members make up there own minds on there own beleifs.
3. have followers suppled with free & unbiased information on all subjects showing both arguments for & against every possible issue for there own personal education
4, include information on various relegions in the litriture.
5. make it known that followers have acess to occult education ( included in the education from various religions ).
6. include training in various psychological methods mostly nlp ( hypnosis ).
7. have these people cold call.
8 if possible & legal target the homes/areas of the Door-to-Door Religious groups.
i dont think it would be hard to recruit a LOT of followers to this du to the availability of unbiased knowledge/education/treaining & a chance to return the door knock.