Pentacostalism In South America

[The Sage Nabooru]

Here's what pisses me off about this:

 

South America is almost entirely Roman Catholic. So, then, Christian. What irks me is that these Pentecostalist churches come in to convert the locals to the "right" Christianity.

 

Because we all know that the Catholics, whose orphanages and hospitals (in many cases) are the only places for miles around to get sound medical treatment or a child a home without a religious lecture (really!) are actually devil-worshipping, drooling Satanists who are out to capture your soul in a bid to suffer alongside it in hell and Latin is a language used by members of the Temple of Set and IHS stands for "Isis Horus Set". Right?

 

We need to save them Catholic souls! And the best way to do it is to get them to collapse on the floor in twitching fainting spells and spitting out infantile syllables that sound vaguely like the names of circus elephants! Hallelujah!

 

It just pisses me off so much, because Catholicism has mellowed out enough in recent years to not care enough to make a real effort to convert people back to Mother Church. So we've got these Bible-thumping idiots tramping through the villages of South America telling people to curse the devil-worshipping papists and convert to Fundyism. And what really grumbles my guts is that the No. 1 reason this is being done is Money.

 

Catholic parishes in South America are some of the poorest in the world. People hardly have enough to feed themselves. What better way to tap in on all that financial potential than to tell them that their local church worships the Devil and is ensnaring them in sin, and then push the illiterate farmers and tradesmen to give whatever they have to their New Jeebus so they can go save other Catholic souls? It has probably almost nothing to do with religious sincerity and everything to do with some rediculous power struggle that white Southern fundamentalists are determined to win. I'm willing to bet that more than half the Pentacostal bigwigs who are running these churches from their leather armchairs back in Alabama and Texas wouldn't dare stoop to share a dinner with the "spics" and "brown people" they're making money off of.

[insomniac]

I have an LDS friend heading to Russia to mormonize the poor people. I agree completely; why can't we leave people alone, they have their own way of life, let's not rip them off and put delusional thoughts in their heads.

[The Sage Nabooru]

LOL @ "Mormonize". Yeah, I've heard of some of the fundy cults out there. Apparently, "Russian Orthodox" is the same as "Roman Catholic", in that their souls have been misled and need to be put on the true Protestant path. Luckily, it seems from Pravda (to me at least) that the Russian government is viewing the cults with a wary eye. As in, Keep an eye on those nuts, and if they do anything stupid we'll plan from there.