{"id":89,"date":"2004-04-16T13:49:21","date_gmt":"2004-04-16T04:49:21","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/unknowngenius.com\/blog\/archives\/2004\/04\/16\/knock-knock\/"},"modified":"2005-07-13T23:58:05","modified_gmt":"2005-07-13T14:58:05","slug":"knock-knock","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/unknowngenius.com\/blog\/archives\/2004\/04\/16\/knock-knock\/","title":{"rendered":"Knock, Knock&#8230;"},"content":{"rendered":"<p\/>When you thought this had to be the place where they would not come after you&#8230;<\/p>\n<p\/>Guess who just knocked at the door in the middle of my midday porn-browsing session, to ask me if I had accepted Jesus in my heart yet?<\/p>\n<p\/>Yes, indeed: the two middle-aged women (actually probably in their mid-twenties, but dressing as a neurotic librarian from the bible-belt always tend to make you look older) patiently though relentlessly knocking on my door where <a href=\"http:\/\/everything2.net\/index.pl?node_id=79952\">Jehovah&#8217;s Witnesses<\/a>.<\/p>\n<p\/>\n<p\/>Of course, being Japanese before being JW, they were reasonably easy to get rid of with a polite &#8220;sorry I&#8217;m busy&#8221;, though not before one had started digging in her religious phrase-book for ways to greet me in my own language&#8230;<\/p>\n<p\/>Which takes us to this amazingly funny <a href=\"http:\/\/www.jwic.com\/stat.htm\">statistics page<\/a> apparently kept by the JW church itself, and giving a good insight on the amount of work involved in mass soul-saving ventures. With pearls such as this graph comment:<\/p>\n<blockquote><p>\n<i>5. How many preaching hours does it take to convert a person to a Jehovah&#8217;s Witness?<\/i><br \/>\n<br \/>Top and bottom 20 countries of the ratio of one baptism to hours. The higher the ratio, the longer hours are needed to convert to Jehovah&#8217;s Witnesses. For example in Japan, it takes about 18,000 hours (!) of preaching to gain one baptism, whereas in Nepal it takes only 2000 hours.\n<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>So let&#8217;s not be too hard on those poor Japanese Witnesses: they got a much tougher gig than their counterparts in, say, Nepal, Congo or Tajikistan.<\/p>\n<p>Another bit of some interest is that, according to these stats (let&#8217;s not forget they are provided by the JW&#8217;s church itself, therefore of more than dubious objective value, but anyway), Japan is the country where the church has incurred its highest number of defections last year, by a wide margin&#8230; <\/p>\n<p\/>I guess the <a href=\"http:\/\/religiousmovements.lib.virginia.edu\/nrms\/aums.html\">Freaky Religious Cult<\/a> thing is not as popular as it used to be here&#8230;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Got a visit from Japanese Jehovah&#8217;s Witnesses&#8230;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"activitypub_content_warning":"","activitypub_content_visibility":"","activitypub_max_image_attachments":4,"activitypub_interaction_policy_quote":"anyone","activitypub_status":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[9],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-89","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-only-in-japan"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/unknowngenius.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/89","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/unknowngenius.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/unknowngenius.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/unknowngenius.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/unknowngenius.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=89"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/unknowngenius.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/89\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/unknowngenius.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=89"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/unknowngenius.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=89"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/unknowngenius.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=89"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}