Holyroller at work starting to get on my last nerve.

[PassingFair]

She's always been hyper religious, but here in
Michigan, magical thinking is starting to become
fashionable in my office.

This woman is very nice, but always mangles
her words...for example, when she came back
from a trip to Mexico with intestinal problems,
she told me she had a "touch of Montessori's Revenge".

:rofl:

Anyway, as the times get rougher and rougher, she
is bolder and bolder about her god-thing at the office,
it's PRAISE THE LORD this and CAN I GET AN AMEN that
day after day.

She called me yesterday to PRAISE THE LORD, her taxes
on her home went down, so PRAISE THE LORD, she didn't
know WHY she was SO BLESSED to have extra money for
Christmas!

I told her that God traded her half of her property
value for it.



She really doesn't think beyond her nose AT ALL.

She asked my a couple of weeks ago if I wanted her
intersessionary help to get a new business sale this
week, and offered to pray with me.

I told her that cholera victims in Haiti
might be a bigger concern of His at this time....

[Warpy]

1. Would you rather see her or be her?

That crack about her property value was priceless, though.

I managed to work with a couple of holy rollers. I managed to cope by realizing their idiocy and magical thinking had nothing to do with me.

[awoke_in_2003]

2. Did she even blink...

when you delivered these lines?-

"I told her that God traded her half of her property value for it."
"I told her that cholera victims in Haiti might be a bigger concern of His at this time...."

When I do this to the "Praise the Lord"ers at work I usually get nothing but a blank stare. I get a good laugh out of it, though :)

[PassingFair]

3. No. She just laughs....

I don't know why she bothers to talk to me.

She knows I'm an atheist, but I'm her closest
confidant at work.

:crazy:

[enlightenment]

4. You're her project.

I was a project once - the woman was relentlessly chipper and perky and god this-and-that . . . a veritable tsunami of treacly evangelizing.

After a few years, she finally snapped. All the treacle dried up, all the good will vanished. Her fangs came out, her claws bared, and she informed me in a tone so rife with venom that, had she been a snake I'd have perished instantaneously, that I was "GOING TO BURN! BURN IN HELL!!"

The effort left her red-faced and breathless . . . so I asked her if that was the Christian version of an orgasm . . . she certainly LOOKED like she'd gotten off! I thought I might just get to witness apoplexy, but after sputtering a moment she just stomped off, finally granting me blissful silence in the break-room.

Your responses are brill - especially the first one - and I agree that you should just ignore her unless you can slip in a good one for your own amusement. Even if they don't seem to register, they probably have a cumulative effect that will lead to a melt-down. It's worth it.

[onager]

5. You guys really make me appreciate my job.

I'm surrounded by atheists. And Democrats. And this is in the aerospace/defense industry, where we have a LOT of Buy-bull thumping conservatives.

The only comment I've ever heard about this came from a woman in our department who's Jewish. I think she's mostly "cultural" Jewish and not "religious" Jewish. Though I admit, I don't go around asking people about their specific religious beliefs and only hope they return the favor.

One day she just commented: "What is it about all the atheists in this department? I can't figure it out." None of us really had a good answer for her. There wasn't a Secret Atheist Conversion Cabal or anything - we were all independently non-believers before we ended up here.

Even among the people who are not self-identified as atheists around me, I don't know of anybody who's overtly religious.

It hasn't always been this way. At a company social function a few years ago, somebody started talking about 9-11 and said something like: "To defend our way of life, we will all have to choose between fighting for God or fighting for Allah."

I commented that I was certainly willing to fight for certain good stuff like democracy and the rights of humankind. But I wasn't about to fight over two non-existent beings.

A chilly silence fell over the table...