So I go home last night, and waiting for me in my mailbox is this week’s issue of Time magazine.
The cover story this week is, “Should Christians Convert Muslems?”, and already I’ve got that sinking feeling in my stomach. The question itself is silly, since anyone with an ounce of common courtesy would realize the answer is “No”. Just live and let live, kids; you believe whatever invisible sky pixie you want to, and let them believe whatever invisible sky pixie they want to, mmkay? Especially in a volatile region like Iraq, where there’s already enough suspicions that GeeDubya started a war as a pretext for a Christian attack on Islam.
But hey, I paid for the subscription, might as well curl up and read the article, hmmm?
Hooo boy. Big mistake – not only are these Evangelical Christians discourteous, they’re also arrogant as hell and twice as ignorant:
[ul]
[li]Comparisons of Christianity vs. Islam include eye-rollers like “Jesus arose from the dead and is alive. Muhammad is dead,” and John Ashcroft’s boneheaded “Islam is a religion in which God requires you to send your son to die for him. Christianity is a faith in which God sends his son to die for you.”[/li][li]Oh, here’s a good one – “Islam is the terrorist, Muslims are the victim.” Yeah, way to go, condemn members of an entire faith as terrorists, why don’cha?[/li][li]“The muezzin’s first call to prayer rings out at 4 a.m. And pray Josh does. ‘I pray for the people responding,’ he says. ‘I pray that as they go to mosque, Jesus would somehow be revealed to them. I pray against that call—that it would not affect their souls.’ He prays he may help lift ‘this totally oppressive spiritual atmosphere.’” So he’s praying that the folks going out to follow their faith will be turned away from it instead? What unmitigated arrogance! What a total asshole![/li][li]More arrogant assholeishness: the notion that followers of Islam, Buddhism, and/or Hinduism are “enslaved” by their beliefs, and by extension, Satan. “Most [evangelicals] would subscribe to Luis Bush’s generalization about Islam, Buddhism and Hinduism: ‘Satan wants to keep people as miserable as possible for as long as possible.’” What a prick![/li][li]These folks are also a bunch of liars – some folks sneak into countries under the pretxt of doing secular work, when what they really want to do is preach. Others just flat-out lie about their faith, the better to play “save the heathens”: “Then there are the apparent attempts by some missionaries to camouflage their faith as a kind of Islam: inviting prospective converts to ‘Jesus mosques,’ publicly reciting the Muslim creed, ‘There is no God but God, and Muhammad is his prophet’; or allowing themselves to be regarded as Muslim mystics, or Sufis.”[/li][li]It turns out that oftentimes these “outspoken” eangelicals end up screwing things up for all local Chjristian aid-workers. “Missionaries also face charges of neglectful carelessness regarding reprisals they sometimes bring down on pre-existing Christian churches and nonevangelistic aid groups. Says Lamin Sanneh, a Muslim convert to Catholicism who teaches the history of world Christianity at Yale: ‘They come in, don’t report to the local churches, stir up a hornet’s nest and then quit town when the going gets tough. Why start a controversy if you’re not there to face the brunt of it?’”[/li][li]And if that’s not bad enough, these idiots end up endangering the people they’re trying to “save” – “A 2001 study prepared for the Southern Baptist Convention’s International Mission Board … describes his experience in a country where, he claims, ‘the majority of believers in Jesus Christ were systematically hunted down and martyred.’ Such perils support the missionary argument that some Muslims remain in the fold less out of faith than out of fear. But the persecution poses for evangelists an additional and potentially embarrassing problem of relative risk, given that (notwithstanding the four recent deaths) converts are in far greater jeopardy than those who brought them to Christ.”[/li][li]Ultimately, it just boils down to the fact that these Evangelical Christians are just a bunch of insensitive pricks who don’t give a damn about the mess they make. “‘Something you must understand,’ Robert e-mailed, ‘is that diplomacy does not work with Satan.’ He realizes that interjecting an uncompromising gospel at so sensitive a time and place may provoke hostility. But he sees that as an inevitable consequence.”[/li][/ul]
Yes, yes, I know, not all Christians are troublemakers, and not all evangelicals are dipsticks. But the level-headed folks wouldn’t think about jumping head-first into a war zone, sticking their noses where they don’t belong, trying to stir up the locals because they stupidly think Muslems are “imprisoned by Satan.”
But these folks – the ones who don’t know better – are a bunch of clueless shithead assholes, and watching them go into hot zones, deliberately stir up trouble, and smear other people’s faiths with ignorant name-calling, they are in serious need of a dozen smacks in the head with a Clue-By-Four.
ASSHOLES!