Suppose you put a sign up on your house that said in big bold letters, “No Christian Evangelists, Please” — but a sales-pitchy Christian showed up at your door with a stack of Bibles and Chick Tracts.
How would you feel about that?
Annoyed, right? Okay, but since you’re a nice person, you’d send them away with no harsh words, offering instead a simple, “We’re not interested.”
You’d talk about it after with atheist friends, but that would be pretty much the end of it. You’d hope.
But what if it wasn’t? What if, instead of going away, the nice Christian showed up at your front door again and again. And then showed up at your back door. And then at your windows, shouting “God loves you! Only God can give you everlasting life! You need to listen to me!”
You’d be seriously pissed, I imagine. Possibly even afraid. After all, if they’re willing to surround your house and yell the pitch through your windows, who knows what else they might do?
Online here, I have no windows and I’m relative safe. There are a couple of doorways to my attention, one through my email address, which I don’t advertise, and another through the comments.
Even that doorway is fairly well protected. My comment filter catches hundreds of spam comments every day. But a few get through. Only a few. Which is why I was surprised to see this today in my email queue: Fourteen-plus goddy headlines, sent in to the comments of 14 different stories, and all linking to this partly completed site — God Help Me Please Jesus (which sounds like something you’d scream as a steamroller ran over you slowwwwwly, crushing you) is so unfinished it still contains the template’s original text greeking.
I have very little idea how spam works. Why place a comment that says nothing but “interior designers” or “house renovation contractor”?
But still … just the phrase “Jesus Prays For You” is so intriguing it almost draws you in, doesn’t it?
But not quite.