Talking to Protesters Outside Planned Parenthood

 ✨✨  ✨✨ Today's to do list:

✔ Pulled my bike over in front of Planned Parenthood on my way home.

✔ Talked to a religious couple with signs protesting the clinic.

✔ Learned about how they hadn't convinced anyone to change their mind about abortion.

✔  Learned they have never actually been inside a Planned Parenthood or used their services.

✔ Learned about how nobody who works at the clinic is interested in talking to them, yet they continue standing outside their workplace anyway, which is stalking behavior.

✔ Pointed out to them that their presence while wearing camouflage probably intimidates people who visit or work at the clinic, especially given the history of bombings and shootings by right-wing terrorists.

✔ Pointed out they are probably there to make themselves feel better, not to help anyone else, and their behavior is creating harm.

✔ Asked how they would feel if people made a practice of organizing protests in front of their church, especially based on intentionally misleading information about their church, while demanding that their right to worship was outlawed.

✔ Got them to admit they weren't comfortable with: 1) the federal government fully banning abortion, 2) the conditions of other countries in which abortion is banned, especially for women and girls, 3) locking up poor women for getting one while incentivizing wealthy women to receive one overseas, and 4) creating medical injuries or deaths from back alley abortions on the inevitable black market.

✔ Assured them that God had sent an atheist to deliver these important messages for them to pray about. ✨✨  ✨✨

Dear Bethel Missionary Baptist Church of Creswell, Oregon:

If you're going to send your moral entrepreneurs to knock on my front door and proselytize to me about the Bible, you simply must bring your 'A' game next time! The two young men you sent over were cutting and running in less than 10 minutes. I thought my eternal salvation deserved a bit more of their attention, especially given that they thought it wise to spend a Saturday evening knocking on my door to begin with.

Yes, I gave them a warm up act of reading a few very brief Bible passages and accepted that these claims may even be internally consistent... but then I pointed out that they failed to establish even the basic pretext of authority that the Bible would have for the metaphysical claims they were making about the universe, the epistemology of conscious experience, and the ability for non-physical beings of immense power to sometimes author specific books - but not films or computer software.

They presented an interesting theory about how they were the "real Jews" - which certainly surprised my upstairs neighbors who are of Jewish ancestry and watched with a mix of horror and amusement at this exchange. The two young men with Bibles in hand also seemed quite certain that The Book of Mormon was a "fraud" even though it contains claims of the same deficient evidentiary qualities as their own religious literature.

And this notion that I should want to go to Heaven even though they claimed my pets and non-believer friends won't be waiting for me is a really tough sell. If you're going to fabricate eternal promises, at least make them reasonably appealing to convey.

In any case... upon your Bible hucksters' next visit, please plan to stay for at least an hour because we have many basic logical and factual premises to establish before we can take on authority the claims you are making to be true. And if they could become less visibly agitated and defeated when their statements are challenged, that would be great!

You know where I live and I know your arguments better than you do.

Sincerely,
Danny Ledonne
atheist with respect to the ≈10,000 gods which humans have believed in at one time or another

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The Christian Scriptures and Slavery:

Neither Jesus nor St. Paul, nor any other Biblical figure is recorded as saying anything in opposition to the institution of slavery. Slavery was very much a part of life in Judea, Galilee, and in the rest of the Roman Empire during New Testament times. The practice continued in England, Canada and the rest of the English Empire until the early 19th century; it continued in the U.S. until later in the 19th century.  (source)

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