How NOT to Convert People...

Anyone who knows me probably knows that I've always found the preferred forms of proselytizing irritating at best and blasphemous at worst. So, imagine my annoyance that I now can't go to the store without this woman, who is always blocking the pathway leading to the store these days, shoving religious tracts into my hand with a brief "I want to give you this." Yes, six words and the word of G-d being treated as if it's an ad for a sale on toilet paper are going to make me rethink my entire religious outlook instantaneously.

Other things that make me want to convert:

*A giant, poorly constructed wooden cross with a sound system/microphone embedded in it so a so-called minister can spout inanities into it in the middle of a Mardi Gras crowd.
*Seeing a so-called man of G-d stand in the pre-scheduled path of a Mardi Gras walking crew with said cross, then deck a member of the crew for prancing near him.
*Short, greasy pedophile-looking guys getting in my face about how Christians are the new Israel and Jews are going to hell.
*People make a big show of praying in the streets, b/c they obviously didn't read Jesus of Nazareth's opinion on praying in the streets or decided it didn't apply to them.
*People saying, "It's okay if you're Jewish. Jesus was a Jew. He was a rabbi." (A tip: You can't say Jesus was a rabbi AND that he never married. Those two things were mutually exclusive until recently.)
*People trying to preach about a religion while otherwise being completely ignorant of the religion/culture of the man who founded it.
*People saying, "Either everything Jesus said was true and he is G-d or he was the biggest liar in history. So, are you calling Jesus a liar?" This one is my biggest pet peeves, b/c I don't know many people stupid enough to change their religious outlook entirely because they're worried about calling someone who died nearly 2,000 years ago a liar. Also, b/c we don't know exactly what he said as there are no contemporaneous records and shouldn't have been. (Rabbinic teachings weren't written down until the late first century. So, Jesus wasn't "illiterate" just b/c he didn't write down his teachings.) Instead, we have multiple conflicting accounts written decades later. I respect those who follow those teachings, but I don't have to choose between accepting every word written by someone who never met the man (completely stripped from all other evidence) or calling Jesus himself a liar.

There are so many more that I really shouldn't go on, but I think you get the picture. I'm not converting, so stop bugging me already.