Driving into a cul-de-sac. A well-heeled neighborhood, and we work the homes as we go. Retracing our route, a fellow from the first house charges across his lawn, clad in shorts only. The day is warm.

HEY!…HEY! he bellows. You left me your tract! Here’s one for you! He shoves a tract at the car. A description of our errors: Jehovah’s Witnesses don’t view Jesus as God, we don’t believe in  burning hell, we don’t send the good people to heavenly bliss.

It’s hard to know what to do with a hopped up fellow like this. JUST REMEMBER, BUDDY, he blusters, ONE OF US IS WRONG!

Ah, well, honest mistake, I counter, trying to placate him, but he’s having none of it. He hollers once more: ONE OF US IS WRONG!

I think he wants me to say. Yeah, it’s YOU, you pighead! And then we’ll blow the whole afternoon in ecclesiastical war. But there has to be better ways to spend your time.

Look, God can sort this out, I begin. We don’t have to….

READ YOUR BIBLE, PAL! And then he rams us with some favorite scriptures from memory, just as you might thrust a cross at a vampire. Apparently he thinks we’ll choke on them, and he hollers yet again: ONE OF US IS WRONG!

Sometimes you just can’t get out gracefully. So you settle for getting out. We did.

This guy doesn’t like Jehovah’s Witnesses. He has some doctrines he cherishes, all-important doctrines, and he knows we deny them all, so perhaps it’s not surprising.

Anti-Witness websites, of which there’s quite a few, fall into two categories. First is the kind this bellicose fellow might maintain. Strictly religious. Doctrinal. Absolutely intolerant, not just of us, but of anything that strays from their belief.

Then they are the secular anti-Witness sites, no friendlier, but with a different set of gripes: our neutrality, view of blood, denial of evolution in favor of creation.

One might suppose the last gripe would give us common cause with the fundamentalists, but not so. For the latter punch holes in the otherwise sound argument one can make for creation by insisting on silliness. For instance, the Hebrew term rendered “day.” in Genesis need not refer to a 24 hour day. It can, but it can also refer to an indefinite period, just as an old-timer might speak of life “back in my day.” Why, then, insist on the earth and all life on it coming about in literal days, when such a view is patent nonsense?

I’m afraid I know their answer: Because it’s in the Bible, and the Bible SAYS WHAT IT MEANS and MEANS WHAT IT SAYS! 

The thing that really irks me is that secular people mistake us for them.