Fringe benefits
I share a flat with my sister and, like many people on here, we periodically get called upon by the Jehovah's Witnesses. Or rather we did.
Now, I've long since twigged that the only people who ring the door bell on Sunday tend to want to discuss the afterlife so I usually ingore the plaintive jingaling of the door and carry on with whatever I'm doing. They used to wake me up by calling at the ungodly hour of 11am on a Sunday, though, which was profoundly irritating.
However, my sister, being of a more enthusiastic bent when it comes to debating with cultists than I, would tend to invite the Witnesses in, give them a cuppa, and then attempt to convert them to the Church of England on the basis that their souls were in peril.
I must admit that this is fun to watch, as sister is massively clever.

The thing is, I'm interested in absolutely everything. A lot of the posts on this topic have, predictably, been about the hur hur hur stoopid relidjus peephul, but I'm inclined to think that if billions of people have a belief in something then it's sensible to at least try and understand what it is they believe in even if I don't necessarily agree with them, as those beliefs do still to a large extent define our world and our interactions with it and understanding where people are coming from is a good place to start from if you want to change things.
With this in mind, I've read the books. The Bible, cover to cover. The Ko'ran. All of the major ones and a number of the minor ones. Take the Bible, for example, Whilst it's very easy to pick out the bonkers bits like pillows being an abomination to The Lord (they are, you know - Book of Ezekiel), there's some cracking stuff in there, like the Book of Ecclesiates, which is ace and worth reading. The problem is that you then get another bit of bronze-age complete insanity to mess it up again.
The fringe benefit of all this reading is a good one. One day, as my sister was leaving the house she encountered a smart-looking couple on the doorstep. "Oh", said the couple. "We were hoping to talk to you about the Bible".
"Sorry", replied my sister. "I'm just off out. But you should talk to my brother. He's read it cover to cover."

They never rang the doorbell. They never called. They never came back to our house. That was three years ago, and the Jehovah's Witnesses have never rung our doorbell since.
(davywavy, Fri 20 Mar 2009, 12:13, Reply)