Missionaries In The Developed Atheist Countries

[◊ crazyguy123 ◊]

once we had this mission seminars, and we lay hands on maps and claim the country for jesus,,,,, my small group had japan,,,,

 

hallelujah,,,, japan belongs yo jesus now,,,,,

 

That's what you call playing Risk, Christian style!

[BrotherJosh]

My girlfriend's niece went on a mission's trip to Hawaii. All paid for by her church. 

[Vigile]

I've told this story before, so if you've seen it, sorry.

 

I met some Mormon boys a few years ago and kinda befriended them. I asked them how effective their proselytising was. Not very, was the response. In nearly two years, no converts.

 

This is how it goes for them...

 

Russian host offers some tea and cake. Mormon, sorry ma'am, our religion doesn't allow us to drink tea. Host, Oh!? Some cognac perhaps? Mormon, no alcohol either.

host, chu Wo?

 

In essence, they are forced to tell their prospects that the two things most closely tied to their cultural Id are going to be off limits if they convert. It's like telling a Yankee fan, no baseball, now then, here's my message... lol

[TheRedneckProfessor]

I've told this story before, so if you've seen it, sorry.

 

I met some Mormon boys a few years ago and kinda befriended them. I asked them how effective their proselytising was. Not very, was the response. In nearly two years, no converts.

 

This is how it goes for them...

 

Russian host offers some tea and cake. Mormon, sorry ma'am, our religion doesn't allow us to drink tea. Host, Oh!? Some cognac perhaps? Mormon, no alcohol either.

host, chu Wo?

 

In essence, they are forced to tell their prospects that the two things most closely tied to their cultural Id are going to be off limits if they convert. It's like telling a Yankee fan, no baseball, now then, here's my message... lol

My wife's family (Ukrainian Jewish) don't drink much to begin with, but when my wife converted to the Baptist religion (for a very brief stint) their first response was, "How are we going to celebrate anything with you if you don't drink anymore?!?"  I can imagine how much worse the Mormons have it over there.

[ShackledNoMore]

I've told this story before, so if you've seen it, sorry.

 

I met some Mormon boys a few years ago and kinda befriended them. I asked them how effective their proselytising was. Not very, was the response. In nearly two years, no converts.

 

This is how it goes for them...

 

Russian host offers some tea and cake. Mormon, sorry ma'am, our religion doesn't allow us to drink tea. Host, Oh!? Some cognac perhaps? Mormon, no alcohol either.

host, chu Wo?

 

In essence, they are forced to tell their prospects that the two things most closely tied to their cultural Id are going to be off limits if they convert. It's like telling a Yankee fan, no baseball, now then, here's my message... lol

 

When I was in Japan, a pair of Mormon missionaries knocked on the door of one of the churches I worked out of giving English lessons.  I think it was before my actual deconversion when I was still trying to force myself to believe, but either way, I did not feel at liberty to do other than defend the non-Mormon Christian position.  Kind of embarrassing, actually.  I wish I could have applied critical thought in a conversation, as I would do now, or that I could have talked about something more interesting, like their experiences going door to door.  I already know how difficult the Japanese were to convert, and I already felt a wee bit more outcast than I already was by virtue of being a gaijin because I wouldn't drink, but no tea!!!????  In Japan!!!????  I've never been to Russia, but I can't conceive of it not being even worse for those poor saps than it was for their counterparts in Russia.

[Vigile]

 

I've told this story before, so if you've seen it, sorry.

I met some Mormon boys a few years ago and kinda befriended them. I asked them how effective their proselytising was. Not very, was the response. In nearly two years, no converts.

This is how it goes for them...

Russian host offers some tea and cake. Mormon, sorry ma'am, our religion doesn't allow us to drink tea. Host, Oh!? Some cognac perhaps? Mormon, no alcohol either.

host, chu Wo?

In essence, they are forced to tell their prospects that the two things most closely tied to their cultural Id are going to be off limits if they convert. It's like telling a Yankee fan, no baseball, now then, here's my message... lol

 

My wife's family (Ukrainian Jewish) don't drink much to begin with, but when my wife converted to the Baptist religion (for a very brief stint) their first response was, "How are we going to celebrate anything with you if you don't drink anymore?!?"  I can imagine how much worse the Mormons have it over there.

how's her family btw? You can pm me if you don't want it public.

[Vigile]

 

I've told this story before, so if you've seen it, sorry.

I met some Mormon boys a few years ago and kinda befriended them. I asked them how effective their proselytising was. Not very, was the response. In nearly two years, no converts.

This is how it goes for them...

Russian host offers some tea and cake. Mormon, sorry ma'am, our religion doesn't allow us to drink tea. Host, Oh!? Some cognac perhaps? Mormon, no alcohol either.

host, chu Wo?

In essence, they are forced to tell their prospects that the two things most closely tied to their cultural Id are going to be off limits if they convert. It's like telling a Yankee fan, no baseball, now then, here's my message... lol

 

 

When I was in Japan, a pair of Mormon missionaries knocked on the door of one of the churches I worked out of giving English lessons. I think it was before my actual deconversion when I was still trying to force myself to believe, but either way, I did not feel at liberty to do other than defend the non-Mormon Christian position. Kind of embarrassing, actually. I wish I could have applied critical thought in a conversation, as I would do now, or that I could have talked about something more interesting, like their experiences going door to door. I already know how difficult the Japanese were to convert, and I already felt a wee bit more outcast than I already was by virtue of being a gaijin because I wouldn't drink, but no tea!!!???? In Japan!!!???? I've never been to Russia, but I can't conceive of it not being even worse for those poor saps than it was for their counterparts in Russia.

Haha. It was a Mormon who put me in my place when still a believer. My friend invited me to meet his father for a Bible discussion. His father was a prof of linguistics. When I left, I was reeling. I don't think it was too long after that I deconverted.

[♦ Fuego ♦]

 

Another couple of old ladies were missionaries in Japan. They had a different approach of using the symbols in the Japanese language to witness Christianity. They said the word "choice" was two people on either side of a tree, indicating Adam and Eve. There were apparently other symbols like that.

 

That's funny.

 

I could be talking out of my ass, because it was years ago, I was never that good to begin with, and I've massively forgotten what I knew, but I googled the kanji for "choice", and "sentaku" came up, composed of two kanji: 選択

 

Now a complex kanji is build from building block representations of simple kanji known as radicals.  The kanji for tree is 木.  I've seen it all over the place as components of other kanji.  The kanji for person is 人.  I seem to recall having normally seen represented as a left radical as 亻.  We obviously don't have a match, at least if we're using "sentaku" and not some other word.

 

I could be wrong, but my uninformed guess is that whatever they did was really lame.  Even if they did manage to come up with something clever, it's embarrassingly unpersuasive.

 

 

Turns out it was Chinese (aren't the characters very similar?) Here's a link to a xian website about it: http://www.bibleprobe.com/chinese.htm

[ShackledNoMore]

 

 

Another couple of old ladies were missionaries in Japan. They had a different approach of using the symbols in the Japanese language to witness Christianity. They said the word "choice" was two people on either side of a tree, indicating Adam and Eve. There were apparently other symbols like that.

 

That's funny.

 

I could be talking out of my ass, because it was years ago, I was never that good to begin with, and I've massively forgotten what I knew, but I googled the kanji for "choice", and "sentaku" came up, composed of two kanji: 選択

 

Now a complex kanji is build from building block representations of simple kanji known as radicals.  The kanji for tree is 木.  I've seen it all over the place as components of other kanji.  The kanji for person is 人.  I seem to recall having normally seen represented as a left radical as 亻.  We obviously don't have a match, at least if we're using "sentaku" and not some other word.

 

I could be wrong, but my uninformed guess is that whatever they did was really lame.  Even if they did manage to come up with something clever, it's embarrassingly unpersuasive.

 

 

Turns out it was Chinese (aren't the characters very similar?) Here's a link to a xian website about it: http://www.bibleprobe.com/chinese.htm

 

 

In my mind, saying it's Chinese is interchangeable with saying it's Japanese for our purposes, because the Japanese more or less imported the Chinese writing system to adopt as their own a long time ago, and with minor qualifications they use the same set of ideograms as Chinese (the Japanese have tended to simplify some kanji for everyday use, and generally have a smaller subset of ideograms--only a couple of thousand--in everyday use).

 

Again, I have to make the disclaimer that I am no expert in this matter, and I know maybe just enough to be dangerous, but...

 

The dishonesty here appears to be overwhelming.  Chinese characters started out several thousand years ago similar to Egyptian hieroglyphics: as just pictures of whatever they were supposed to represent.  Some of them still resemble the pictures they developed out of: if you look on the page you linked to, you can see that "mouth" still resembles (sort of) a mouth, and that "tree" still kind of looks like a tree.  That part is not an accident, but rather an artifact of these characters having originated as pictures of objects.

 

So looking at the first example, boat, which they allege testifies to the events in Genesis, they show that it is the combination of three characters: vessel, eight, and mouth.  Only for mouth, they say it is the character not just for mouth but for..."mouth" or "person."  Um, well, there is certainly a perfectly good character for "person" already: it is 人.  As I say, I'm not an expert, but I really, really suspect that they have basically lied here to make mouth fit their own purpose: In my modest experience, in cases where it makes sense (often whatever etymology there might be of a compound character is not obvious at all, at least to me), 口 has always meant "mouth" or "opening" or "enclosure" or something like that, and the idea that it could instead represent our English concept of a mouth as a person (e.g., "a mouth to feed"), just seems like a real reach to me.  If I happen to be wrong, I'd be delighted to be corrected by someone who knows more about this than I do.

 

Now it would makes perfect sense to find 口 used in boat in the sense of an enclosure, but there would have to be a really good explanation as to why it would be used to represent "8 people" and further that 口 would be used to represent person, rather than 人.  Or, one could make up a really bad explanation to fit it into his predetermined world view.  (I.e., since we know that the babble is flawless, and its version of the flood is literal history, then surely this must be reflected in all the cultures that sprang forth shortly after the flood.  Hey look: the ark was a vessel that carried 8 mouths to feed, and whaddaya know, those are exactly the characters that constitute the Chinese character for boat!  That must be it!  I can leave myself willfully ignorant about actual Chinese etymological scholarship.)

 

Moving on, do they really think that the characters for the word they translate as devil that spring from whatever mythology the Chinese entertained thousands of years ago is one and the same with the modern Christian idea of Satan?  For your overview reading pleasure, here's what Wikipedia has to say about it:

 

According to Chinese tradition, mogwai are certain demons, which often inflict harm on humans. They are said to reproduce sexually during mating seasons triggered by the coming of rain. Supposedly, they take care to breed at these times because rain signifies rich and full times ahead.^[1]

The term "mo" derives from the Sanskrit "Mara", meaning 'evil beings'. In Hinduism and Buddhism, Mara determines fates of death and desire that tether people to an unending cycle of reincarnation and suffering. He leads people to sin, misdeeds and self-destruction.^[2]Meanwhile, "gui" does not necessarily mean 'evil' or demonic spirits. Classically, it simply means deceased spirits or souls of the dead. Nevertheless, in modern Chinese, it has evolved to refer usually to the dead spirits or ghosts of non-family members that may take vengeance on living humans who caused them pain when they were still living. It is common for the living to redress their sins by sacrificing money to gui by burning (usually fake) paper banknotes so that gui can have funds to use in their afterlife.

Notably, the modern popular use of mogui as 'demonic' and gui as 'devils' is somewhat a consequence of Western influences as Chinese-language biblical texts translate the Satan in the Book of Job and the Greek term 'diabolos' as mogui.

 

Their analysis of the origin of this word arising from the snake from the Garden of Eden from the Christian creation myth just reminded me of drawing conclusions by reading tea leaves, yet they call this proof of the accuracy of the OT account of creation.

 

It looks like they didn't show anything about either "choice" or about two people on either side of a tree (trees are found all over the place as radicals in Chinese characters, by the way), but they did show one that was built from a woman under (they say between) two trees which they say means covet.  Apparently the Chinese etymology for this character is because Eve got to choose between two trees, and she chose the wrong one.  I actually had to think about it to figure out where they got "covet" out of that!

 

 

The whole site looks like a real piece of work, by the way.  From the top two articles on their home page I learned that Christians are sinning by putting their kids in public school, and that the 4 lunar eclipses between 2014 and 2016 is biblegod yelling against U.S. foreign policy and signaling the coming of his wrath.

 

[ShackledNoMore]

 

 

I've told this story before, so if you've seen it, sorry.

I met some Mormon boys a few years ago and kinda befriended them. I asked them how effective their proselytising was. Not very, was the response. In nearly two years, no converts.

This is how it goes for them...

Russian host offers some tea and cake. Mormon, sorry ma'am, our religion doesn't allow us to drink tea. Host, Oh!? Some cognac perhaps? Mormon, no alcohol either.

host, chu Wo?

In essence, they are forced to tell their prospects that the two things most closely tied to their cultural Id are going to be off limits if they convert. It's like telling a Yankee fan, no baseball, now then, here's my message... lol

 

When I was in Japan, a pair of Mormon missionaries knocked on the door of one of the churches I worked out of giving English lessons. I think it was before my actual deconversion when I was still trying to force myself to believe, but either way, I did not feel at liberty to do other than defend the non-Mormon Christian position. Kind of embarrassing, actually. I wish I could have applied critical thought in a conversation, as I would do now, or that I could have talked about something more interesting, like their experiences going door to door. I already know how difficult the Japanese were to convert, and I already felt a wee bit more outcast than I already was by virtue of being a gaijin because I wouldn't drink, but no tea!!!???? In Japan!!!???? I've never been to Russia, but I can't conceive of it not being even worse for those poor saps than it was for their counterparts in Russia.

Haha. It was a Mormon who put me in my place when still a believer. My friend invited me to meet his father for a Bible discussion. His father was a prof of linguistics. When I left, I was reeling. I don't think it was too long after that I deconverted.

 

 

Yeah, a year or two before I deconverted, some guy also left me reeling after he demonstrated an area in which his sect was following the Bible and mine was not (and it was a legitimate point).  Those who don't go on to deconvert seem to have an easier time immunizing themselves against such challenges.