The Education of a Bible Thumper

When the Jehovah’s Witnesses come a-knockin’

How do you react when a group of Jehovah’s Witnesses knock on your front door? Over the course of my life my reactions have changed quite dramatically. (Thankfully, they have gotten better.)

A hundred years ago, back when I was a young twenty-something living in California I suddenly found that a small group of Jehovah’s Witnesses decided I needed saving and they started showing up at my apartment door about every five days.

At first I was polite and explained that I was not a Christian and that I was not interested in their proselytizing. I didn’t want to be ‘saved.’ And I didn’t want to hear their rote bullshit. I politely asked them to leave me alone and not come back.

But every five days or so they kept knocking at my door. I became less polite with each knocking and my patience grew thinner.

Then one day, while I was cooking dinner and sipping a margarita, a thundering knock sounded at my door. At first, I thought it might be a young woman who I had invited to come over. I got a little excited.

But then I went to my front door and looked through the peephole. It was the freaking Jehovah’s Witnesses!

I got pissed. I immediately took off all my clothes except for underwear and answered the door almost naked with a margarita in one hand and a cigarette from my mouth.

Every one of the Witnesses put their hands over their mouths and proceeded to run away as fast as they could without a word spoken. At that young age I wasn’t sure I had ever seen old people run so quickly.

But it worked. They never came back. Looking back at that event so long, long, long ago, I now realize what a disgusting moron I was.

From an early age I have had an aversion to proselytizing. I think it has a lot to do with the fact that I was once a Bible thumper. Not in this life. It was in what some people term a “past-life.” I happen to view the notion of reincarnation much differently than most people. I prefer to view that other life as a Bible thumper as a “simultaneous life.” But I digress….

That other life as a Christian Bible thumper spanned over sixty years from the late 1800s to the early 1900s (according to the human concept of linear time). I lived in the American South and I was a devoted Christian who read the Bible from cover to cover once for every year I was alive after the age of ten.

I could Bible thump as well as anyone. You could mention any subject and that simultaneous me would, within seconds, flip to the very passage in the Bible that addressed that subject. Flipping through the pages of the Bible was an art-form to me; one that I had worked for over half a century to master.

While I was a dues-paying, card-carrying member of a certain organized Christian religion, I was not sanctioned by that religion to officially Bible thump. I held no position in that church. You could say that I was a lone wolf proselytizer. I was an independent Bible thumper.

That church that other me “belonged” to did, however, allow me to teach Sunday School. This was one of my greatest joys in that life. Why? Because it involved telling stories, which, in that life, was a secret passion of mine. I longed to make up stories and tell them but I didn’t believe that I could do that and so I didn’t. Instead I simply re-told Bible stories that have been told countless times. Still, the act of telling stories and the joy that comes with that was indelibly stamped upon the matrix connecting all my simultaneous selves.

But I digress.

In that life as a Bible thumper I spent my entire life confined within the rigid parameters of the Christianity gestalt. I never, ever questioned it — at least not until the very last few years of that life. Every aspect of that life revolved around the words in that one book. I never had more than a couple hundred followers but I was a proselytizing Bible thumper extraordinaire. It was the basis of that entire life.

In my own current life my dharma has been different (yet similar). I had another simultaneous life that lived the Christianity gestalt and took it to its very limit. Why would I simply do that all over again in this life? That would be redundant. We came into this dimensional reality and split ourselves up into hundreds or thousands of different faces/lives in order to garner a “wholeness of understanding” of this dimension of physicality. How can we do that if we only live through the same gestalt over and over and over? (Einstein’s definition of insanity comes to mind.)

I’ve actually had numerous other lives steeped in the Christianity gestalt but this current life has been all about going BEYOND Christianity. It has been about breaking out of that rigid box of thinking and exploring other perspectives and philosophies.

So, as it happened, I was born into this life to two parents who proclaimed themselves to be Roman Catholic. But my father never went to church more than once or twice a year — only on the most “sacred” of holidays. My mother vehemently refused to ever step foot inside a church. In her later years she finally admitted to me that she was an ardent atheist. It was no surprise to me.

Despite their indifference to or extreme opposition to Christianity, my parents forced us kids to go to Catholic church and Catholic Sunday School every single, solitary week. The hypocrisy was blatantly obvious to me even as a child. (It did not occur to me then that those two hours each Sunday was the only time my parents had alone together without kids around.)

But as a young kid I did not mind going to church or Sunday School. I actually looked forward to it. I was hopelessly interested in spiritual concepts and I was hopelessly drawn to all the Bible stories (due, no doubt, to the impinging influence of that other life as a Bible thumper). I wanted to learn more about this God person that everyone was talking about — and yes, ‘he’ was always described as a person; a person with all the negative attributes of a human person such as anger, vengeance, wrath, judgment, racism, and spitefulness. In addition to this, I was enamored by stories of miracles. As a kid, I totally believed in miracles. They seemed so natural.

But with each passing year I became ever more disillusioned with the Christianity paradigm. I still believed in a God but not the vengeful, judgmental God that the church portrayed. It just did not sit right within my being. I wanted to find the God that existed outside of the confines of a church, the God that permeated all of existence, who existed even within the heart of so-called sinners. And I wanted to find my relationship with that greater God.

So one day when I was fourteen years old I came out of church one gloriously beautiful Sunday and I stepped aside from the flow of people leaving the church. I walked over to the lawn at the side of the church. I stopped and looked up into the sky. And I made a compact with God. I swore to God that I would never enter a church again as long as I live.

And I have to this day kept that promise to God.

I was afraid that my parents would force me to keep going to church but surprisingly they just shrugged their shoulders when I told them I would never go to church again. It turned out to be easier than I thought. My siblings, however, kept going to church every Sunday as they had been taught, afraid, no doubt, that if they didn’t they wouldn’t get into heaven. To this day they have never, ever, ever questioned anything that they were told.

Not me. From that day forward I have always questioned EVERYTHING that I have been told.

Sadly, that questioning did not always lead to loving behavior. For many years I reacted very negatively to any Christian proselytizing that was directed towards me. I was not only reacting harshly to the gestalt but also to that Bible thumping other life I lived a hundred years ago. I had become as judgmental as the proselytizers and the God they invoked.

For years I couldn’t wait for some Jehovah’s Witnesses to dare knock at my door so that I could unleash my wrath in new creative ways.

I was an idiot for a long time.

I did not make a pact with God to never step foot inside a church again in order to be like my mother. She never stepped foot inside a church because she was an atheist. I did it because I wanted to cut out the middle man.

Nowadays if I were ever foolish enough to admit to someone that I was not a Christian the immediate response has always been, “Oh, so you’re an atheist?”

No!!!! No, I am not an atheist. Just because I’m not a Christian does not automatically mean that I’m an atheist. It is not just Christians who believe in God. There are many, many other humans who “belong” to other religions who are not atheists. Why do most Christians not understand this? (Because they are taught to think this way. And they are taught to never, ever question what they are taught.)

No, I am not a Christian. But I have a very deep, intimate, one-on-one relationship with god. And there is no middle man!

That is what religions are. They are middle men. You can’t have a relationship with God except through us! You can’t talk to God except through us! You can’t have access to God except through us! And you sure as heck won’t get into heaven unless you attend our church every single Sunday and put some money in our collection plate every single Sunday! You’ll never get into heaven except through us! (The middle man.)

Even as an ignorant fourteen-year-old I could see through this sales pitch.

So from that day forward I never went to church again and I never went to Sunday School again. My three siblings branded me as evil. My parents didn’t really care. And I didn’t really care either. I left all that behind as I stepped out into a lifelong quest for greater understanding and deeper spiritual experiences than I could ever have within a limited hierarchical religious power structure that came between me and the divine. I stepped out of the box I was born into. I embarked on a journey without limitations.

It was one of the best things I have ever done in my life. And I was just fourteen years old! Of course, I would remain an idiot for many years.

Fast forward thirty-some years…

I had become a capitalist. A businessman. For nine years I owned and operated a bookstore. I had one particular customer who spent a lot of money in my bookstore over those years. His name was John and he was a Jehovah’s Witness.

Most of his business came in the form of special orders. He special ordered a lot of Christian books. The Christian book section in my store was rather tiny, especially in comparison to the huge Metaphysical Spirituality section. He also bought and ordered a lot of history books. I was always happy to see him come in the door because I knew he would be ordering some expensive and often obscure Christian texts. He was always alone when he came into the store.

But after a couple of years that changed.

John still came into my bookstore to shop but he always came in alone and usually wearing gym clothes. But suddenly he also began coming in wearing a suit and tie with three or four or five other people, also nicely dressed. This happened once or twice a month.

It turned out that John was tasked by his church to undergo missionary work among the locals of our town. He was sent out to spread the word, Jehovah’s Witness style. I later learned that the JW missionaries were not supposed to go into businesses to proselytize. They were only supposed to knock on residential doors. But the missionaries had to tally up the number of people they proselytized to in order to reach some successful total and since he knew me and we got along I was an easy tally mark for him. He figured that I would not mind.

And the weird thing is that I didn’t mind! I really didn’t.

After coming into my store John and his gang would first make sure there were no customers at the front counter then John would hand me some pamphlets of Jehovah’s Witnesses ‘literature.’ He then opened up his Bible and searched through it for some passage and read it aloud. Then he would ask if I had any questions then he invited me to attend their church.

After they left I would usually throw the pamphlets in the trash although a couple of times I glanced through them. The artwork always made me laugh. Jesus was always portrayed with a very short neatly trimmed beard and very, very short hair. I didn’t know there was a plethora of barber shops in the Holy Land way back then. I pictured Jesus walking into a neighborhood barber shop and saying, “I’d like a 1950s style haircut please.”

(All the apostles also had 1950s style haircuts. The non-Christians always were portrayed having long scraggly hair.)

The important thing is that I was always very nice and accommodating to them. What the heck happened to me?

I noticed that the group that came in with John would look around my store while he Bible thumped. They all noticed my selection of incense, tarot decks, and Buddha statues. I’m sure they were all judging me as an evil sinner.

For almost three years they kept coming in for a round of proselytizing and I was always delightfully charming. But over the course of those three years I noticed something remarkable happening.

In the beginning John was not a very good Bible thumper. He would struggle to find passages, turning pages in one direction and then another. But over the course of months he blossomed into a master Bible thumper. Repeatedly licking his forefinger, he would flip through his bible with uncanny speed and agility. He could find an exact passage in just a second or two. It was amazing!

I like to think I had a part to play in his thumping proficiency. After John read a passage and asked if I had any questions I soon always had one, forcing him to quickly find the passage that would answer the question. Eventually I started asking him multiple questions just so that I could watch him flip through his Bible. He became a true master Bible thumper. (Just like I once was in a ‘previous’ life.) I became very proud of him.

John was a truck driver by trade and one day he died in a horrible vehicular accident. No Jehovah’s Witnesses ever came into my store again. I was very saddened to hear this. I liked John and I liked talking to him.

I missed him.

What John unknowingly helped teach me was patience. I knew him as a person before he became a Bible thumper. And I realized that after he became a Bible thumper he was still a person and I still liked him. I realized that after I left Christianity as a teenager I immediately became judgmental towards those still on the path of Christianity. Like I said, I was an idiot for a long time.

Thankfully, I came to realize that everyone is on a path and they happen to be at a certain point along that path. I’ve been at that same point at some point in time. Judging someone for being at any point along their own personal path is not helping them one iota. It is just dragging them and myself down. Looking back at our own lives it also does no good to judge ourselves when we were at certain points on our path. We are all at different points along our chosen paths and judgment only holds everyone back. Instead it is best to love and uplift everyone. If we did that all of our various paths will more quickly lead us to a better world.

I may not be a Christian but it was a Jehovah’s Witness who helped teach me about patience and tolerance and the limiting nature of judgment. The truth is that every path holds a treasure of wisdom. By releasing judgment we can metaphorically walk in the shoes of others and garner some of that wisdom from all those paths. Perhaps then we will realize that together we are all on the same larger path.

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