Sunday Disparage

[thereisnoperfect]

We draw the lines on behaviors, not on specific groups that we pick--especially in this case, where the group we pick is the one we happen to know well.

 

So you can make a valid argument to ban certain actions, even if they are motivated by religion, as being harmful to the society or to individuals. I would support laws saying that kids have to be immunized and provided medical treatment, for example, no matter what Christian Scientists or Jehovah's Witnesses want. The same law would apply to someone who was just anti-vax out of stupidity. 

 

But you can't just outlaw Christian Science as a whole.

 

I think my underlying problem with your position, Bhim, is that it's very broad-brush. Yes, some people have been hurt--badly hurt--by some parts of evangelical christianity. But I also know some people who have benefitted from it. And letting a genie out of the bottle that gives somebody power to shut down a widespread group just because it's done some harm--I don't like where that would lead.

 

Churches as a group are not like meth labs. They're more like bars. Some people have their lives ruined by them. Some communities are hurt by one. 

 

Others do some good in their communities, or for some people. Sometimes those two groups overlap. 

 

But prohibition created as many problems as it solved. We need a more organic and nuanced solution to a complex problem

[Darkillusion]

I respect a country's decision to ban missionaries. I do not support ratting out said missionaries to the authorities however. If they get caught, that is their problem, but I'm not going to help that process along. What if they were killed after being found out, which happens in Islamic countries? What if they were kept in jail in filthy conditions for a really long time?

 

Someone mentioned painting Christians with a broad brush, and I agree that's what you're doing. sure there are bad missionaries, but the majority want to, for example, nurse people back to health after a natural disaster while sharing the happy, hopeful parts of the Christian message. I don't believe someone like that should go to jail.

 

They are taking a risk going into a country where it is banned, but their intentions are good, they think they are truly helping. I would feel terrible for being the catalyst that destroys someone's life, and their loved ones back home, just to prove a point.

 

As for burning churches...it just sounds like a really aggressive way to intimidate a particular group of people. It doesn't serve any purpose or solve any problem other than to intimidate. And I would like to believe that ideally that is not what America is about or stands for.

[Bhim]

I will hopefully have the opportunity to respond to Deva's and Thereisnoperfect's very important points soon, but I wanted to address this right away.

 

I respect a country's decision to ban missionaries. I do not support ratting out said missionaries to the authorities however. If they get caught, that is their problem, but I'm not going to help that process along. What if they were killed after being found out, which happens in Islamic countries? What if they were kept in jail in filthy conditions for a really long time?

Someone mentioned painting Christians with a broad brush, and I agree that's what you're doing. sure there are bad missionaries, but the majority want to, for example, nurse people back to health after a natural disaster while sharing the happy, hopeful parts of the Christian message. I don't believe someone like that should go to jail.

They are taking a risk going into a country where it is banned, but their intentions are good, they think they are truly helping. I would feel terrible for being the catalyst that destroys someone's life, and their loved ones back home, just to prove a point.

As for burning churches...it just sounds like a really aggressive way to intimidate a particular group of people. It doesn't serve any purpose or solve any problem other than to intimidate. And I would like to believe that ideally that is not what America is about or stands for.

 

Darkillusion, please don't take this the wrong way, but these comments above reflect an attitude among Americans which equates Christianity with moral uprightness.  This attitude is precisely why I decided to start taking a harsher tone with evangelical Christianity. No, the majority of evangelicals do not want to nurse people back to health while sharing happy parts of the Christian message. It's true that liberal Protestant denominations send service workers overseas and call them "missionaries," but as I've made clear throughout this thread it is evangelicals that I hope to focus on. Were you referring to liberal Protestant missionaries? Because this is the only context in which I could agree that your statement is factually accurate.

 

I've already shared statistics on what Americans believe about eternal hell.  If you disagree with my cliams, I challenge you or anyone else to start finding missionary boards that believe in the doctrines of evangelical Christianity, and send missionaries to only share the "happy parts" of the Christian message. You'll be hard-pressed to do so, because there are no happy parts. As I alluded in my Easter greating elsewhere in the Lion's Den, when a missionary approaches a non-Christian, if he were intellectually honest he'd have to tell that person that his entire family and most of his friends are going to eternal hell, and that the ones who have died are already there. There is nothing happy about the gospel of Jesus whatsoever.

 

Again, if you disagree with me feel free to look up evangelical mission boards (e.g. the SBC's International Missions Board), and see what they believe.  They don't believe in sending humanitarian aid unless it comes with the hellfire mission.  This isn't good.  This has the effect of exploiting people who are in dire need, and it should remind us of cult religions that extort money from terminally ill cancer patients with the promose of healing.  Someone like that should be put to death, but I'll settle for a jail sentence.

[Darkillusion]

I will hopefully have the opportunity to respond to Deva's and Thereisnoperfect's very important points soon, but I wanted to address this right away.

 

I respect a country's decision to ban missionaries. I do not support ratting out said missionaries to the authorities however. If they get caught, that is their problem, but I'm not going to help that process along. What if they were killed after being found out, which happens in Islamic countries? What if they were kept in jail in filthy conditions for a really long time?

 

Someone mentioned painting Christians with a broad brush, and I agree that's what you're doing. sure there are bad missionaries, but the majority want to, for example, nurse people back to health after a natural disaster while sharing the happy, hopeful parts of the Christian message. I don't believe someone like that should go to jail.

 

They are taking a risk going into a country where it is banned, but their intentions are good, they think they are truly helping. I would feel terrible for being the catalyst that destroys someone's life, and their loved ones back home, just to prove a point.

 

As for burning churches...it just sounds like a really aggressive way to intimidate a particular group of people. It doesn't serve any purpose or solve any problem other than to intimidate. And I would like to believe that ideally that is not what America is about or stands for.

 

Darkillusion, please don't take this the wrong way, but these comments above reflect an attitude among Americans which equates Christianity with moral uprightness.  This attitude is precisely why I decided to start taking a harsher tone with evangelical Christianity. No, the majority of evangelicals do not want to nurse people back to health while sharing happy parts of the Christian message. It's true that liberal Protestant denominations send service workers overseas and call them "missionaries," but as I've made clear throughout this thread it is evangelicals that I hope to focus on. Were you referring to liberal Protestant missionaries? Because this is the only context in which I could agree that your statement is factually accurate.

 

I've already shared statistics on what Americans believe about eternal hell.  If you disagree with my cliams, I challenge you or anyone else to start finding missionary boards that believe in the doctrines of evangelical Christianity, and send missionaries to only share the "happy parts" of the Christian message. You'll be hard-pressed to do so, because there are no happy parts. As I alluded in my Easter greating elsewhere in the Lion's Den, when a missionary approaches a non-Christian, if he were intellectually honest he'd have to tell that person that his entire family and most of his friends are going to eternal hell, and that the ones who have died are already there. There is nothing happy about the gospel of Jesus whatsoever.

 

Again, if you disagree with me feel free to look up evangelical mission boards (e.g. the SBC's International Missions Board), and see what they believe.  They don't believe in sending humanitarian aid unless it comes with the hellfire mission.  This isn't good.  This has the effect of exploiting people who are in dire need, and it should remind us of cult religions that extort money from terminally ill cancer patients with the promose of healing.  Someone like that should be put to death, but I'll settle for a jail sentence.

I live in a midwest town known as the city of churches.  I have been to many churches and almost all have a missions department where they send laypeople to help people in other countries (and of course share the "gospel", usually at a church already established in the country).  I never went on a "mission trip" myself so my personal experience is limited.  They come back with videos of building people homes, singing happy songs, playing with kids, giving them supplies they need, and saying prayers.  Now how much emphasis is put on hell, I do not know.  I say this so you know the background I'm writing from.  I think you are not defining these missionaries as true missionaries.  I apologize if I got off the topic of what you were trying to convey.  

 

I am not disputing your statistics about hell, I certainly believed that nonbelievers would get sent there myself.  It didn't sit well with me though, so I suppose I was one of the intellectually dishonest people you mentioned that tried to gloss over that part when sharing my beliefs with other people.  When it got down to it, I felt like if I shared all of what the Bible teaches, no one would be interested in Christianity.  That should have been a red flag right there!  The so-called happy part of the gospel I mentioned and that I shared with others was that god loves us as individuals and he sent his son to die for the bad things we do.  That's not so bad, if you don't think too hard about it  

 

I took a look at that SBC missions website.  I can see your point, they are so interested in "harvesting souls" that they don't actually care about the people.  I wouldn't want those individuals going to jail if you reported them, but it would be nice if they were specifically banned from ever flying to or entering that country again.  I know missionaries as a group are banned, but if they had the names of individuals that were doing it, it would be easier to keep them out.  

 

I am curious, do you know how many missionaries SBC sends out every year?  

[Bhim]

I live in a midwest town known as the city of churches.  I have been to many churches and almost all have a missions department where they send laypeople to help people in other countries (and of course share the "gospel", usually at a church already established in the country).  I never went on a "mission trip" myself so my personal experience is limited.  They come back with videos of building people homes, singing happy songs, playing with kids, giving them supplies they need, and saying prayers.  Now how much emphasis is put on hell, I do not know.  I say this so you know the background I'm writing from.  I think you are not defining these missionaries as true missionaries.  I apologize if I got off the topic of what you were trying to convey.

 

No apology necessary, this seems to be a very common source of confusion between me and other posters.  And I always want to understand the background of other posters, since it gives me a context for their comments.  Now, I don't know what denomination(s) the missionaries you are referring to are affiliated with.  While I think that giving aid in the name of Jesus is culturally harmful since it distances the recipients from their own religions, this sort of thing doesn't rise to the level that I would be sufficiently motivated to report the missionaries.  Even if I were, simple distribution of aid doesn't violate the anti-conversion laws in either India or Israel.  I'm not familiar enough with other countries' anti-conversion laws to comment, although I suspect that it would still be illegal in most Islamic theocracies.

 

I am not disputing your statistics about hell, I certainly believed that nonbelievers would get sent there myself.  It didn't sit well with me though, so I suppose I was one of the intellectually dishonest people you mentioned that tried to gloss over that part when sharing my beliefs with other people.  When it got down to it, I felt like if I shared all of what the Bible teaches, no one would be interested in Christianity.  That should have been a red flag right there!  The so-called happy part of the gospel I mentioned and that I shared with others was that god loves us as individuals and he sent his son to die for the bad things we do.  That's not so bad, if you don't think too hard about it

 

Well, I'm in the minority here, but I don't put a particularly high premium on intellectual self-consistency.  If someone practices Christianity because they have a certain history with the religion or because it's part of their culture, and refrains from converting anyone else, I don't take any issue.  So really I'd consider it a positive point that you were bothered by the doctrine of hell as a Christian.  I, on the other hand, relished the thought of non-Christians suffering in eternal torment because they did not bend the knee to Jesus.

 

I took a look at that SBC missions website.  I can see your point, they are so interested in "harvesting souls" that they don't actually care about the people.  I wouldn't want those individuals going to jail if you reported them, but it would be nice if they were specifically banned from ever flying to or entering that country again.  I know missionaries as a group are banned, but if they had the names of individuals that were doing it, it would be easier to keep them out.

 

Well, I suppose we'll simply have to respectfully disagree here, since I think that people should go to jail for violating this just and moral law against the evil of missionary work.  Not that I'm at all opposed to banning the missionary before he has a chance to commit the crime.

 

I am curious, do you know how many missionaries SBC sends out every year?

 

Yes, actually this information is available on the IMB's website.  See here: http://www.imb.org/main/give/page.asp?StoryID=5523&

 

There are almost 5,000 missionaries, and shockingly there were over 300,000 reported in 2011.  Given what a message of dispair one finds in evangelical Christianity, it is horrific to think that the SBC is able to spin Jesus in such a way that this many people find him appealing enough to separate themselves from their families and communities for this pretender god.