C’mon, the Pope’s got some killer red velvet slippers!!
Again your truth shines like a beacon for all to see. I too am impatient, especially with myself. But being able to spend 15.00 a year to come here and witness words like yours makes it worth it. Thanks for shelling out your hard earned money.
God seems to be the only one allowed to get away with ends justifying means, even though those who defend him don’t know what the ends are.
I don’t accept ends justifying means from those with limited resources. I can’t begin to imagine accepting it from a being with unlimited resources.
Something of a change; i’m pretty much in agreement with all the things JThunder and** FriarTed ** have said (apart from the actual belief 
), although…
… while I myself am unbothered, I think comparing yourself to Jesus in that way seems somewhat crass.
Again, nonsense. As I’ve repeatedly point out, culture goes far beyond religion. One might argue that religious proselytizing can affect certain aspects of a native culturek, but that is a far cry from demonstrating that it eliminates these cultures, as you asserted.
You keep dodging that point. I think we all see why. It’s because your unable to substantiate your original accusation, and so you choose to defend a much weaker position.
Bull. I have said nothing about the value or quality of native culture. What I’m saying is that you have yet to prove your point… namely, that missionary work causes these native cultures to disappear without a trace.
As I’ve repeatedly pointed out, I don’t deny that certain aspects of culture could potentially be displaced. Logically speaking though, this is not the same as demonstrating that it amounts to removing “all traces of indigenous culture and habits.”
No, it’s an admission that certain aspects of native culture can potentially be displaced. I have never denied that.
What I object to is your original claim that the “indigenous culture and habits” are wiped out without a trace.
I see. So because you can’t defend your position, you now choose to attack my person. How nice.
As I’ve already pointed out, Beaucarnea, my personal beliefs are not on trial here. In fact, I have not said anything about my personal religious convictions in the course of this thread. They are simply irrelevant to the topic at hand.
The issue (as I’ve emphasized numerous times now) is your assertion that missionary work causes indigenous culture to be wiped out without a trace. You have not said one thing to substantiate that claim. Instead, you assert that religion plays a large influence in one’s life – a claim that nobody would deny, but which is vastly different from what you originally stated.
And now that I’ve pointed that out repeatedly, you choose to disparage my person. You lambaste me, asking me why I choose to save indigenous people instead of, say, Buddhists or Jews. You say this, even though I said nothing about my personal religious viewpoints in this thread.
I most certainly did not say that missionaries should proselytize isolated cultures to the exclusion of Buddhists, Jews or other religions. Yet somehow, you choose to attack me on that basis. You choose to rake me over the coals for a position that I do not advocate – one that I, in fact, reject.
Heck, I specifically pointed out that the vast majority of missionaries do NOT minister to “isolated cultures.” I pointed out that the overwhelming majority serve in nations that have had substantial contact with other nations. How in the world can one construe this to mean that I think proselytizing should be reserved for those isolated cultures? It boggles the mind.
You know what? I think you’re going to continue to defend a watered down position (“But religion pervades peoples lives! It’s very influential!” or words to that effect). I also think you will continue to lambaste my religious beliefs or actions, even though I have said nothing about my personal religious convictions in this thread. So much for fighting ignorance, then.
Most of my beefs are not about Christianity, they’re about individual Christians. I remember a conversation where my mother insisted that Jews revered Jesus, they just didn’t consider him the messiah. When I told her that she was incorrect, she just said, “And you know everything then.” It wasn’t worth arguing, so I gave up.
I don’t believe I said that their actions were inherently evil. I do think it arrogant of anyone to go to any other culture and espouse the “superiority” of their own religion or cultural values.
No, I was referring to someone upthread (may have been you) who said that the native people’s held “mistaken” beliefs. That notion in itself is arrogant.
Here it is again: who are you to say that you KNOW the spiritual “cure” (if any cure there be) for anyone beside yourself? That is arrogance, vanity and pride talking.
As do many Christians: what an arrogant claim to make!
How is commonality a rationale for holding a premise? Lots of religious (and non) groups claim to know what’s best. Atheists do claim to be better off without that pink unicorn in the sky. Xians claim to be better off with Jesus as their homeboy. Who is right? Who knows? Each person makes up his or her own mind according to their culture, their value system, their upbringing.
My beef is with those Christians who offer to pray for me (not a part of my value system, comes across as arrogant–as if God will only hear THEIR prayers); those who wish to “share” the Word with me–they don’t want to “share” they want to witness and convert. I’m not buying, so stop giving me the hardsell; and those who want to “help” the idigenous people to see the Light.
Missionaries come in with their shoes, their metal snaps, shampoo, work gloves, their ziplock baggies–basic, ignored tools of our culture, to people who have no such technology (I am speaking of isolated tribes), to then claim that they only want to spread the Word, is disigenuous at best. They cannot help but spread our culture as well. It is human nature to want what others have. To see these simple “artifacts” in action is to already change a native people. Not all change is bad, and I’m willing to share all of the above with anyone (and more), but to do it knowingly–and without disrespecting the native’s present religion.
I see no reason at all to convert anyone to Christianity whatsoever. When Jesus told his disciples to spread the word, he was starting a rebel religion, one that was seen as threatening the establishment. Christianity IS the establishment now. If someone were to approach me and ask about faith or spirituality, THAT is the time to share (with sensitivity to that person’s situation). Being invited in vs knocking the door down is a huge difference to my mind.
FriarTed–You are not seriously saying that Jesus would like the way his church looks now? He got a ball rolling all right-but it has veered terribly off course.
He preached a message of love and acceptance to all. He didn’t hang all the accoutrements of religion on his path–his disciples did (and they shut out half the people on the planet in the process. You know, the women). IMO, Jesus’ message of love has been twisted, warped, abused and trounced on by a millenia of “Christians”. WWJD? Indeed.
But what came first, the reasons or the ‘knowledge’. By ‘automatically right’, I mean the attitude of ‘Of course it’s right, it’s my belief, and you can’t question it’. As if the belief starts out right, and anyone questioning it has to prove it wrong. I hear things like ‘Well prove god wrong’ or ‘Prove the Bible is wrong’ all the time.
Most of the reasons I get, and I do ask, for people believing in Christianity have to do with being brought up in the church, or claiming to experience god at some point. The experience is always vague and widely interpretable, and maybe half the people I’ve talked to have responded agrily when I questioned them. I have yet to meet someone who has given me a sound objective reason for believing. And I rarely get that far in the discussion because IME people tend to fall to the ‘thats just what I believe’ or anger when their beliefs are questioned.
Of course He wouldn’t like the way His Church looks now. He didn’t like it then.
He was constantly correcting His disciples & after He ascended, had them
constantly correct His Church. Yes, I believe the original disciples AND Paul
faithfully & correctly guided the Church as Jesus wanted. He did preach love
& acceptance to people who need His message of salvation, but He also
preached repentance and obedience to His Father God and to Himself
as Lord (and I do believe He taught that He and His Father and the
Spirit were aspects/persons of Yahweh God.)
I wasn’t comparing myself to Jesus- I was just noting that the accusation of arrogance on the part of Christians can just as well be leveled at Jesus.
The Church as a whole & Christians as individual are flawed, sinful, hypocritical,
sometimes downright monstrous. I do not challenge that at all. BUT even if
every Christian for the past 2000 were consistently faithful & virtuous & compassionate, a lot of people would still resent Christians, the Christian Faith
& the Church because of one message-
Jesus is Lord and they are not.
THAT is the real “arrogance” that many people cannot stand. I’m not thrilled by it myself sometimes. Jesus can really mess up one’s hopes & dreams & desires.
My main beef with Christianity is that, most likely, Christ never existed. He was dreamed up as a way to validate early Christians’ beliefs in a new deity they called Christ which was actually a deity they stole from Roman theology. The version of that belief that won out was that Christ was both spirit and body, son of God and son of Man, and that he must have been sacrificed on the cross, and it must’ve been very, very meaningful and important, and so it must have been to save humanity. The whole new testament is a fictional work written by people who wanted to convince themselves. The Old Testament was more or less taken from Judaism. And from there we get the whole entrail of hypocrisy that is the history of the Christian religion.
And, by the way, I believe people with good intent are generally people with good intent. People with bad intent are people with bad intent. I don’t think religion can be blamed for people’s intent, just the flavor their behaviors take. So I see missionaries with good intent who screw up the lives of under-industrialized peoples are clearly people with good intent and terrible behaviors.
Sure fooled Josephus, Tacitus, Suetonius, and the Talmudic Rabbis.
And every academic history department.
It wouldn’t matter how faithful, virtuous, and compassionate the whole lot of you were. It still wouldn’t make Jesus my “lord.” Walking the walk just makes you not a hypocrite. It doesn’t make you right.
My biggest problem with Christianity (other than that I just couldn’t make myself believe in it) is the thing about believers going to heaven and non-believers going to hell. I prefer the Jewish belief that “the righteous of all nations have a place in the World to Come”.
No, you’re right. Judaism does accept converts, but we don’t actively try to convert non-Jews. There are groups (such as Chabad) that seek out non-observant Jews and try to persuade them to live a more observant lifestyle, but they pretty much leave non-Jews alone.
Not quite.
You’re considered Jewish if you have a Jewish mother or if you convert*. But not all conversions are accepted by all Jews. If you convert with a Conservative or Reform rabbi, as most Americans who convert to Judaism do, most Orthodox Jews don’t consider you Jewish, because they don’t think that conversion as done by Conservative and Reform rabbis is valid.
*You are considered Jewish by Reform Jews if you have one Jewish parent (either mother or father), are raised Jewish, and identify as Jewish. Conservative and Orthodox Jews don’t accept patrilineal Jews as Jews unless they formally convert, though.
No, pronouncements like this are the real arrogance that people can’t stand.
What does this even mean? Jesus is Lord…of what? Of whom? Why should someone else want this job?
My beef: The Bible. - No matter how moderate a lot of Christians are, at the end of the day, the source material for their faith is flawed and has been used in so many ways to justify things that I find abhorrent and oppose things that I find ideal.
Just to add an additional point to all this, those who approach synagogues or rabbis expressing a desire to convert to Judaism are more likely to be discouraged than encouraged. Rabbis don’t want to be part of someone’s “phase,” or experimentation or passing fancy. They tend to be reluctant to convert gentiles unless the person petitioning for conversion convinces them that they are very serious and committed. Since Judaism does not contain a theology of salvation through specific faith (Jews don’t think that non-Jews have to be “saved” from anything or that they’re in any danger for not being Jewish), there is no reason to evangelize gentiles (although, as you said, there are various Jewish movements aimed at bringing lapsed or secular ethnic Jews back into the faith).
Indistinguishable I think your argument is founded upon a grave mistake. The reason that you apply to your decision making process is in and of itself a technological advancement. You could go out on the street and find that the vast majority of people are not in possession of this particular piece of technology, and this is in the society where it’s value is prized in a position of utmost importance. The tools of logic and reason that you are using were actually brought by the same missionaries you are speaking out against. Those missionaries opened schools and at the same time as providing religious indoctrination also brought western education with them. Certainly there were parallel advanced societies that had a reason of their own, such as China, that’s why Christianity never penetrated there, but in other places the technology they saw was empirical proof of a more advanced way of thinking.
That being said, a lot of people WERE skeptical of the newcomers. It wasn’t a simple embrace. The wise men of tribes resisted the cultural imperialism being brought to them, and as happens in revolutions time and again, the revolutionaries killed the rival intellectuals. The inquisition flourished in Mexico. This is not unique to Christians, most conquerors employ this tactic.
Not everyone is cut out to be an intellectual and reason as you do. Sometimes they see empirical proof of advancement that they want to have a piece of. It is about the acquisition of the material power, and with that you can turn tribesmen against their brethren. Cortez did a magnificent job of turning the disaffected slave tribes of the Aztecs against their Aztec masters. The Aztecs had already been doing a job of cultural indoctrination, eroding and destroying the cultures that they had dominated. By taking out the masters the cultural confusion was ripe for a new set of indoctrination.
Genetics or racial purity has been used to justify any number of atrocities too. Do you feel similarly about genetics?
My point being that the bible can be used for good or ill. The Devil can quote scripture for his purposes.
Your beef might as well be with the printed word for it can be set to any purpose its manipulators devise.
I think the comparison to Genetics is tenuous at best. Genetics as a science rarely, if at all, pronounces value judgement. The Bible is replete with value judgements and stories that, when taken to heart, tend to create a most oppressive and misogynistic society. You can use genetics to justify whatever crazy idea you hold, but I submit that in that case, genetics merely lends a patina of rationality to the madness rather than engendering them. The Bible positively spawns these crazy ideas, IMHO.