Sermon on the Doorstep (& the Jehovah’s Witnesses)

I did some decorating for my Mum, somewhere in suburbia.  I was applying some sealant to the front door frame, when there was a knock at the door.  I opened it and there was a group of three Jehovah’s Witnesses waiting outside, an old woman, one middle aged and a young boy with a purple tie and gangster shades.  Bibles to hand.  They picked a good time to visit.

I have a lot of time for the Witnesses, and although I don’t agree with all that they say, at least they try to do their bit.  They asked me if I’d considered letting God into my life.

“I don’t mind stopping to talk but I don’t want to waste your time as it’s very unlikely that I’m going to be converted I know you’re doing your bit giving love and all that and it’s hard work giving love I spend lots of time doing it myself saving the planet and all that and it takes a lot of energy out of you and when I hear from some church goers that animals don’t go to heaven as they don’t have souls then I just think I’ll stay right here thank you I love animals and a heaven with no animals isn’t much of a heaven to me and anyway if you know dogs then you’ll know that when you come home at the end of the day they jump up and down in excitement at seeing you it’s obvious from their actions that there’s some kind of thing going on in their heads and you can tell a dog’s happy when you play with it and it knows fear too you can see them cower when they’re threatened if there’s a God then God created me and I have an enquiring mind (older woman: “you certainly do.”) which God must also have created and he must also have given us logic so if I follow God then I must therefore follow the logic and my lines of enquiry and follow the evidence that He created so when I see something that doesn’t make sense it has to be wrong and God must want that to be clear so I heard about the creationist point of view that the world is only a few thousand years old well I can tell you I’ve studied the science of our planet and it isn’t I could explain to you how observations of the rates of deposition of sediments in the oceans prove that sedimentary rocks are so many millions of years old we can watch the process of rock building going on and work it out that the earth is billions of years old then there are radioactive isotopes which decay at certain rates and we can measure the concentrations of these in rocks using mass spectrometers and again prove the ages of rocks and these measurements can be correlated with sedimentation rates and there is clear agreement and of course there are the fossil records is God really that mischievous that He would create false evidence in the planet he built to confound us would he really give us categorical proof of evolution and extinction inside the rocks if he really created the earth then the clear logical inference is that he merely started the process running and let evolution do the rest God himself gave us the clear evidence which disproves the creationist theory beyond any doubt and if I go to church on a Sunday surely that’s using up my time which I