Religious guy tried to convert me and a few friends in a Tim Hortons parking lot - very annoying.

While out on a motorcycle ride with my friend Andrea and her cousin Daniel we happened to stop off at a local coffee shop to have a coffee, chat and take a rest, Somehow the discussion of being Atheist came up. Andrea and I are both Atheists, Daniel considers himself catholic but he is gay so he says he believes but doesn't really agree with the religion.

Anyways we were chatting away about this topic inside the coffee shop and decided to go outside and hang out next to our bikes when all of a sudden this random young guy dressed up like he just came from church (it's tuesday) came over and said "Oh hey, I overheard you guy's were talking about religion in there and I would just like to see whats up?"

so being nice I said I'm Atheist but I was raised Catholic but I respect anyone's religious choice.

Then OMG this guy wouldn't shut up, he went on about Bible Versus, Creationism, How the bible is real FACT and how science is lying to us, I just let him talk while Andrea was sitting on her bike behind him laughing her ass off.. I actually zoned out for most of it

Then he started to get right stupid, talking about how if the earth was 10ft in either direction from the sun we would either freeze of fry, trying to convince us that god crated it for us, so I told him that Actoually the distance fluctuates about 5 million km so 10 feet would not matter.

then he started talking about how people with no faith would just do what they want and everyone would get murdered and raped, then stated that ever since they started teaching evolution (like what, a few hundred years ago?) there has been a steady increase in murders, rapes, the amount of people in jail because of the people not believing in god because of evolution teachings..

So I said, well maybe that has to do with the population increasing, and if you google the religious population of jails you will find that atheists make up almost none of the population while Christians and other religions make up nearly ALL of the population.. So his comeback to that was "Well, most of the information on the internet is lies anyways"

There was so much more, just imagine that you take every rage comic about stupid things religious people say in arguements, this guy pretty much covered it all.

throughout the whole thing I was being very nice and polite to him, I even shook his hand when he was done and told him it was nice talking to him..

but really, he kept us for nearly 30 min spouting off the most ridiculous things about creationism, "fact" of the bible and why it can't be wrong.

I doubt he was no older than 25.. too late to free that mind since it's already brainwashed to the max, I didn't even bother trying, I just listened and threw in a comment whenever I had a chance to speak..

I wish I was better at conversing with people or I would have just told him how he's wrong about everything, Ahh, sometimes I hate being polite..

3 members like this

Comment by Robert Karp on June 15, 2011 at 9:02am: so I told him that Actoually the distance fluctuates about 5 million km so 10 feet would not matter.
This was great Bobby!! You handled it like a pro! So much fun!

Comment by Choscura on June 15, 2011 at 11:41am: Never write off somebody as 'hopeless'. Even a religious mind can be brought out of the arse it has been shoved up in. Even a mind like this can see reason, but you have to strip it of all of it's fallacies while at the same time offering it support so that it can think for itself and not revert to even sillier fallacies. I'm beating a very tired drum about this, but losing your religion is unpleasant and therefore almost never happens during or because of an argument- you don't want to admit defeat to yourself in front of some asshole who's tearing down all your illusions and showing you how your life has been wasted. This is why authors such as Dawkins and Hitchens are so compelling; they use reason and rhetoric to astonishing effect while not discounting the value of religion or saying that you're a bad person or a fool for ever having been a believer. These are the people to learn from.

Comment by Jacob on June 15, 2011 at 3:17pm: "ever since they started teaching evolution there has been a steady increase in murders, rapes, the amount of people in jail because of the people not believing in god because of evolution teachings.."

I also have a problem with that. In America, a very religious country, there are some of the highest prison populations in the world. In England, Switzerland and many other, less religious countries the prison populations are much lower. And so much has changed in the world since they started teaching evolution that blaming crime on that one thing is ridiculous

Comment by gerrymander on June 15, 2011 at 5:06pm: I have, fortunately, never been the subject of a major push to buy into religion, but I would never be as accommodating as most people seem to be when the "how can Atheists have morals" point comes up. I would ask the person, point blank: "So, knowing nothing about me, you're saying that I don't live a moral life?". I suspect the response would be a guilty "no", followed by a recovery along the lines of "well, God has built morals into your spirit/soul/essence", to which my reply would be: "if everyone has received morals from God, why did the 10 Commandments have to be written down? And if everyone knows the 10 Commandments are God's will, why do we need Civil Laws saying the same thing?"

Comment by William C. Walker on June 15, 2011 at 10:31pm: Before I became so deaf I used to enjoy encounters with Mormon kids, Jehovah's Witlesses, etc.Once a Gideon decided to 'work on me'. We talked back & forth respectfully for over two hours. Neither of us made so much as a slight indentation in the other. But HE gave up, not me. :-)

Comment by Guido Edwards on June 20, 2011 at 9:25pm: I try to listen as well, but I wish I had a "Gong" with me, so I could end the conversation after about 30 seconds. Which should be plenty of time, to state an opinion. GONG!

Comment by Bertus Colyn on June 21, 2011 at 8:04am: 30 minutes! No, that’s just damn ridiculous. I like debating with religious people, as long as they don’t get all upset and start shouting at you, but the BS he threw at you? Honestly? … I would’ve told him to take a walk.

Comment by Blondin on June 21, 2011 at 2:05pm: I get into a lot of discussions like this. I'm an amateur astronomer and my friends & I often set up our scopes for public outreach sessions. It's not just religion but astrology, UFOs, chemtrails, Apollo moon hoax and a number of other such silly subjects that we find ourselves challenged to defend against. One of my favorites is the full-moon effect.

I don't mind discussing or comparing notes with people on subjects like cosmology, abiogenesis, SETI, etc. but it gets very tedious when someone starts trotting out all those tiresome, bullshit arguments that we've heard so many times. It still surprises me how often I meet people who really have no idea how the scientific method works and seem to think that the fact that theories change over time is a weakness.

Comment by Lindsay Kreis on June 21, 2011 at 4:04pm: This post is on the Internet...LIES!!!

Comment by Robert Karp on June 21, 2011 at 4:07pm: Lindsay what?

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