The other day I was walking home from the centrum and got stopped three times within five minutes. No, it wasn't because I looked somehow weird (well, weirder than usually) and it wasn't the Finnish police force either. Some group of twenty-something people had been set loose to talk to people.

First I was stopped by two women. They gave me a pamflet inviting me to a get-together of sorts. As a linguist accustomed to Halliday's grammar I have to admire how cleverly it was designed. No part of the paper showed the underlying ideology except for one small thing: there was their website in small print on the right hand corner, a website whose name included the word 'congregation'. So to answer their invitation I kindly thanked them and said no, and as they were in need of further explanation, I pointed out it was a religious thing and therefore I have no interest in joining them. I bid them good day and hoped it'll stop raining to make their quest a bit easier.

Thirty seconds later another pair of women stopped me, handing me the exactly the same pamflet as the previous pair. Again I declined and said their colleagues had already talked to me not a minute earlier. But -and this is important- I was still polite and relatively kind as well. The problem presented itself in the form of three young men stopping me about thirty seconds after the second encounter. These people were giving out a newspaper with different headlines, one of them catching my attention as it had the word 'God'. And eventhough I pointed that out to them and said it is why I am not interested, they just kept pushing it (very manly thing to do, don't you think, not understanding the word 'no' or anything semanticly similar?). Let it be pointed out that until then I had been relatively calm and polite. Then one of the guys blocking my way said it wasn't about religion, that it was about the love of Jesus. As I did then, I still don't understand how those two things are *not* the same bloody thing. Anyway, the next thing I know is him telling me that I "need to go to heaven". I was beginning to get pissed (not the least because a man thinks he has any right to question what I want... but that, too, is very manly way of behaviour, so I shouldn't be that surprised...). In a more irritated voice I question who the hell is it that can say that I *need* to go to heaven. And the he says the magic words: "Jesus loves you".

Counterpoint #1: "Oh, really? I was under the impression there's plenty of people out there saying exactly the opposite."

Counterpoint #2: "You mean you *think* Jesus loves me. When you say it without the preceeding clause you make it sound like you know for a fact, that you're 100 percent sure that Jesus loves me and that you cannot know."

Counterpart #3: "When you say 'Jesus loves you', what you really mean is that you think Jesus loves me but only *if* I do certain things that you promote. Being what I am now is not good enough for Jesus, and most certainly not your angry, vengeful and dictatorial God."

I should have told them to go fuck themselves.