The Indelible Stain

Dear Mr. Porterfield:

    In my last communication with the Jehovah's Witless cult back in November 2018, I'd written to another misguided miscreant named Dennis. I will assume that he is a cohort of yours in this ongoing spiritual and, likely, financial grift you have going on with your JW proselytization scam. I'd sent him back his little pamphlet and had told him in no uncertain terms that I did not wish to hear from him or your burgeoning cult ever again.

     In the ensuing two years and two and a half months, I thought I'd finally rid myself of the stench of your pamphlets and propaganda until today.

     Not recognizing the name and forgetting the last offense from 2018 originated in Northboro, I opened the envelope, intrigued. By the time I'd read the phrase, "good news", a cheerful but always empty salutation I get from time to time from scammers on Facebook, I knew what I was in for.

     I do not know why I am still on your Goddamned mailing list or what is keeping me on it. But that is why the subject header of this email is called, "The Indelible Stain." The stain, in my case, is my home address that you had somehow acquired, through some sadistic and sinister dexterity, and that now I cannot seem to scrub from your list.

     In this respect, all mailing lists are guilty of conferring upon one some pernicious immortality, guaranteeing one's grieving surviving relatives or the next unfortunate and unsuspecting occupant of the deceased's dwelling the ongoing trickle of propaganda. It doesn't matter, apparently, if you're an environmental group begging for assistance in saving some Godforsaken patch of real estate 3000 miles away that would be best forgotten by environmental activists and development consortiums alike, an animal rights group screaming hoarsely about some tiny primate in Papua, New Guinea that's barely a blip on the zoological record or a noxious, infamous cult such as yours.

     Once one is on one of these noxious lists, they are immortal, in a Nigerian banker kind of way. And heaven forbid one actually responds to such irksome appeals even in a negative way.

     That was perhaps my first and only mistake back in 2018. I responded. And, typical of paternalistic, authoritarian, right wing outfits like yours, you took that as a challenge and decided to redouble your efforts to convert me into a cult that has some irrational fear of blood transfusions, whose churches are called not churches but "kingdoms" and "command" your edicts to your brainless, brain-washed parishioners.

     Mr. Porterfield, I am not a man who wears his religion (or, in my case, a militant, conspicuous absence of one) on his sleeve. I am a firm believer in respecting, tolerating or outright ignoring another's religious beliefs, however silly and risibly atavistic, because, as with politics, that is the third rail of human discourse. However, when one intrudes upon my life with their religious dogma with the intention of somehow, magically, against all rhyme or reason to convert me to it, my intellectual and emotional hackles are raised and I will let fly with my beliefs.

     And, as I had made known in my 2018 screed, I am and always have been, since childhood, an avowed enemy of all organized religion. I also believe that if the noxious totalitarian state of Russia had done any one good thing since Communism's fall in the autumn of 1991, it was cracking down on your cult nearly four years ago and labeling it an "extremist" organization.

     I had already made plain in my November screed that I consider religion to be the root cause of much of the world's misfortune since religion first became a concept in the hazy predawn of human history. It has resulted in the suppression of free speech and of provable science (a trend we're still seeing during this pandemic), it has resulted in Crusades against the Muslims, a Holocaust claiming the lives of 6,000,000 Jews, Gypsies, LGBTQ people, the mentally challenged, intellectuals and political dissidents.

     It has also become a major booster of right wing terrorist organizations such as the Republican Party and, especially since the rise of Reagan, shamelessly insinuated its way into politics, thereby violating the terms of its tax exempt status. Religion seeks to curtail the rights of women, minorities and especially the LGBTQ community, even going as far as to violate Supreme Court rulings and to deny gay couples marriage licenses.

     It has also become screamingly obvious during my lifetime that every religion's goal is not just to dominate the world but to establish religious primacy and to apply their dogma's law to every aspect of human civilization, including, and especially, political governance. Ask Savonarola how that went in late 15th century Florence.

     In other words, in the immortal words of Dean Jonathan Swift, "There is just enough religion in the world to make us hate one another but never enough to make us love one another."

     In short, Mr. Porterfield, I must once again ask your cult to cease and desist from contacting me in the future in any and all ways. Failure to do so will result in my reporting you to the Attorney General's Office and have you investigated and subsequently charged with stalking and harassment. Then I will simultaneously dox you on social media, in which I have a very wide footprint, and release your home address. I figure turnabout is fair play- After all, you are abusing your right to my street address. So why shouldn't I dox you and open you up to public ridicule?

     In closing, allow me to add that I think it's especially pernicious of you to practically hide your affiliation for the "religion" for which you have chosen to spend your adult life pimping and would have made no mention of it at all until you were obliged to give me the URL for your cult's website. You held out the hope of meeting me face to face at my home after the pandemic was over (one in which, apparently, your Jehovah couldn't be bothered to meaningfully confront any more than had the orange buffoon who'd just recently oozed out of the Oval Office).

     Doing so would get you ignored at best, vehemently confronted, at worst. You have been warned.