Apparently one of the side effects of temporal lobe epilepsy is you are prone to "religious experiences". Well, I've had none. I haven't even had any decent atheist ones. Dirac has not appeared to me and explained His Equation to me, though given His reputation for being untalkative, He probably expects me to understand the maths of quantum physics myself. What I have been doing is taking some medicines, one side effect is increased irritability. My family knows this, as, I suspect, do my colleagues. Today, some new people have learned that to come do the front door and interrupt me in my extended breakfast and email session irritates me. Normally I'd be at work, but as I'm still on holiday, they got to meet me.
I feel somewhat sorry for people that come to my house to tell me about their specific interpretation of religion. One of the Jehovah's Witnesses this morning seemed pretty upset when she could finally get away. "We came here in peace to talk to you about god", she said, looking fairly distraught. "I didn't ask you come," I replied, before discussing Bristol's history of burning alive people whose interpretation of a shared book others disagreed with. If someone comes to my door, they get the truth broken to them. When they ask me for things like "prove it", they get the scientific method explained to them, how you can't prove that something doesn't exist, and therefore the burden of proof lies on them, and that I'd like a defensible proof, which they never provide. For today's I pointed out that their religion has predicted the end of the world on more than one occasion in the twentieth century; every time they've done this they've been wrong, which didn't help either.
Like I said, one seemed fairly upset. I think they are used to people saying "no thank you", not a ten minute criticism of their unproven hypotheses. But they came to the front door, therefore they have sought my opinion. I didn't go to their little meeting hall round the corner and start denouncing them, they came to me. "Seek and ye shall find", as one of their books says.
The saddest things, believers in that specific religion have suffered for their beliefs, but not gone out their way to persecute anyone else. The only reason I give them and the Mormons a hard time are because they are the only ones who ring my doorbell to tell me their unverified hypothesis. Nobody else is that daft.