The Diatribe * net

Having my office located in the beautiful Journal Square area of Jersey City, I see many a strange sight each day. One thing I’ve noticed over the past year is the amount of religious missionaries there are in the area.

Most mornings there’s some random woman belting out fanatical Christian verses from the bible screaming about how we’re all sinners and going to Hell. She’s harmless and and never does anything more than scream — so I usually just ignore her in my hurried rush to get to the office.

The lunch hour is reserved for my “favorite” religious missionaries — the Jews for Jesus. If you live in the New York City area, and you haven’t been locked in your house for the past few weeks, you’ve no doubt seen the teams of green-shirt-wearing missionaries handing out their pamphlets. They must be hurting for new recruits, as their latest efforts have littered the city with their advertisments.

By the time I’m heading home from work, the Mormons have taken over the square and are often debating religious texts with the locals. Some days they have books, other days it’s pamphlets, today they even had a large painting that looked like the Last Supper, except with Native Americans. I just continue my journey to the PATH Train, iPod blaring.

Fridays during the summer the it’s hard to go five feet without seeing a Jehovah’s Witness. They’re not trying to scout out new recruits, but rather have a religious retreat somewhere in the area, where each friday hundreds of people with name tags take over the square.

I wonder if there’s a signup sheet of some kind, as it’s strange that I’ve never seen any of these groups in the square together at the same time. It’d be interesting to bring them all together and watch as they debated and tried to recruit each other. I guess I never realized what a hotbed of religious debate Journal Square actually is…