You think people hate you, they don’t hate you, but they feel something. Something deep and disturbing. Let me explain what it is
You knock. We open. You smile.
And we see your discomfort.
Yes, yours.
You say it’s normal to go door-to-door talking about God. But your body says otherwise.
Your smile is tense. Your shoulders are tight. Your gaze flickers away for half a second.
Because deep down, you know it’s not normal.
It’s not normal to knock on strangers’ doors to talk about religion.
It’s not normal to impose yourself on someone’s private space when they didn’t ask for it.
It’s not normal to come back again and again after a “no thank you.”
You know it. Your body knows it. And we feel it.
And that’s what makes us uncomfortable.
Not just the intrusion.
But the fact that you’re doing it while being uncomfortable yourself.
That you’re forcing yourself. That you’re obeying something stronger than your own social instinct.
And that’s disturbing.
Because we realize we’re not facing someone who chooses freely.
We’re facing someone executing an order.
When someone discovers that you’re willing to let your child die rather than accept a blood transfusion, they don’t feel hatred.
They feel vertigo.
Vertigo before the abyss between what they thought was a universal human limit “we protect our children at all costs” and what you’re capable of doing.
This isn’t a matter of opinion. It’s the crossing of a line most people thought uncrossable.
It’s the vertigo of realizing that ideology can rewrite survival instinct itself.
When someone shows you evidence — historical, scientific, documented in your own publications and nothing moves, they don’t feel hatred. They feel anguish.
The anguish of realizing that no fact, no proof, no logic can reach you.
As if you were locked behind a glass wall. They knock. They show. They speak.
And you don’t hear them.
This powerlessness in the face of impermeability generates deep anguish.
When someone realizes you can defend the two-witness rule for sexual abuse knowing it structurally protects predators they don’t feel hatred.
They feel fear.
The fear that an ideology can distort the moral judgment of a sincere and good human being to this extent.
The fear of wondering: “What if it were me? What if I had been conditioned the same way? Would I be able to see?”
It’s the fear of realizing that rationality and morality aren’t guarantees. That anyone can be reprogrammed.
When someone learns that you haven’t spoken to your brother, your sister, your child for years because they left the organization, they don’t feel hatred.
They feel crushing sadness.
The sadness of seeing a family bond, something precious, irreplaceable, sacred broken.
Not by war. Not by death. Not by personal betrayal.
By obedience to an institutional directive.
It’s an absolute human waste. And it hurts to witness.
When someone hears you explain that the organization has changed its teaching dozens of times, but that it’s “the light getting brighter,” they don’t feel hatred.
They feel profound unease.
The unease of watching someone normalize incoherence.
Like watching someone smile while explaining that two plus two made three yesterday, makes four today, and might make five tomorrow.
And being sincerely convinced that it’s logical.
It’s destabilizing. Disturbing. Deeply unsettling.
When someone realizes you’re not a monster, that you’re gentle, polite, kind, sincere, but that you defend objectively terrible things, they don’t feel hatred.
They feel horror.
The horror of realizing that evil doesn’t always look like evil.
That it can have a smiling face. A soft voice. Pure intentions.
Hannah Arendt called it “the banality of evil.”
Ordinary, good people doing monstrous things because they obey.
And that’s exactly what terrifies people.
It’s what’s been done to you.
The conditioning that prevents you from seeing contradictions.
The fear that stops you from asking dangerous questions.
The guilt that pulls you back to obedience every time you doubt.
The discomfort you feel yourself at every door.
That discomfort you suppress because you’ve been told it’s normal. That it’s a privilege. That it’s God’s work.
Galatians 5:1: “It is for freedom that Christ has set us free. Stand firm, then, and do not let yourselves be burdened again by a yoke of slavery.”