Litter has long been a pet peeve of mine. Seeing people throw their garbage out the windows of their gigantic pickup trucks as if the entire world was their own personal dump has bugged me for as long as I can remember. Why should the rest of us have to deal with your garbage? Readers will know that this lack of consideration for others is one of the many things I don't like about fireworks or Christians' use of flyers to proselytize. Sure, the Christian flyers I regularly find left on my car or littering the ground at the local gas station bug me because of their absurd messages. But the real problem is the litter. The Christians who cover public places with their propaganda are guaranteeing that someone else is going to have to clean up their mess. We end up with yet another example of how many Christians cannot seem to practice their religion without involving unwilling participants.
Last week was a tough week at work for a variety of reasons not relevant to this post. Let's just say that I wasn't in the best of moods as I walked to the parking lot much later than I had planned to leave. I climbed into my car, put on the seat belt, and started out of the parking lot. As I left the lot, I noticed something on my windshield that had somehow escaped my attention earlier. There was a line of fluorescent green paper under one of my windshield wipers. It was not convenient to pull over, and the paper didn't look like it was going anywhere, so I kept going.
For some reason, I decided that the paper must be a flyer for a new restaurant. Many new ones have been opening lately, and I just figured that was what it must be. I made it home with the flyer still securely under my wiper. It was an 8.5 x 11 sheet of fluorescent green paper with the following printed on one side in a very large font:
Stop, look, and listen. God is trying to get your attention!
There I stood in my garage looking at these words and trying to comprehend why anyone would have put them on my car. You see, this was all that was on the paper. The back was blank, and the front contained nothing else. No church names, no phone numbers to call for information, nothing! What was the meaning of this? Was this silly phrase supposed to convert me right there on the spot? Since there was no contact information, how would whoever left this on my car know if their words let me to discover Jee-zuhs?
I want to meet the person who left this on my car. No, not to hurt them. I want to probe their mind, learn their goals, and attempt to understand how this flyer was supposed to accomplish these goals. Did someone really believe that this would bring me closer to their god, whichever god that might be?
An early version of this post appeared on Atheist Revolution in 2006. It was edited in 2019 to fix typos and broken links.
