I have always been fascinated by the people who go from house to house preaching the Christian gospel, trying to recruit people to join their church.
When I say fascinated it refers both to a decided aversion to this practice based on my agnosticism and a strange attraction to the optimism and faith of the true believers who have the moxie to knock on the doors of total strangers and try to make them accept Jesus Christ as their saviour.
I think it's all a croc, really. It's so hard to discuss religion rationally, factually, scientifically, because people are so irrationally emotional about something, which after all, cannot be proved to be real.
In the current jargon they're faith-based, and I'm reality-based.
My technique with the hardy and earnest proseletizers who knock on my door is to be friendly and polite, but to engage them in a critical discussion of their faith. Some, like the cult-like Mormons, who have been brain-washed into a party line that has been carefully calculated to blunt, refute, or make irrelevant evwery argument brough against the Church of the Latter-Dayu Sants. Others, like the simple, sweet, and nanve Latinas who knock on my door every Saturday morning are confused, threatened, and clearly our to their intellectual depth.
So my idea of flaunting a folk-way was to go door to door in my neighborhood, which is a predominantly Hispanic suburb of Los Angeles, as well as two other neighborhoods of different ethnicity and class.
I decided to do a satire of the typical evangelist. Instead of the bible I brought a copy of Bertrand Russell's Why I am Not a Christian. And instead of askinbg them to join a church I would ask them to consider abvandoining their own religious beliefs for atheism.
I would be lying if I pretended I was not scared to do such an audacious thing al by myself. I'm a 33-year old woman. I didn't think anyone would be afraid of me and I hoped I wouldn't be threatened.