If you really believe in something with your heart and soul, if you’re convinced that without this belief people will be damned to suffer eternal torments, if you also believe that you should love your neighbour as yourself, aren’t you going to want to do your utmost to save that neighbour from the terrible fate that awaits him/her after death?
There may be other more mundane reasons but I think that’s the heart of it. These people genuinely believe what they’re saying.
Because they think unbelievers are too utterly stupid to find information on their relgion if they want to.
We’ve been in a situation where proselytizing wasn’t a good idea- if you’re a despised minority, as Jews have been in a lot of places for much of our history, it might be unwise to upset the leadership of the dominant religion by proselytizing to their members. This is especially true when local laws allow the leaders of the dominant religion to do unpleasant things to you and your converts for proselytizing, as was the case in many Christian and Muslim countries where Jews lived.
Any Jewish tradition of proselytizing would have to be revived from a very long time ago- it’s not going to be something that you saw your parents or grandparents doing, as a lot of Jewish practices are. There is a much more recent Jewish tradition that proselytizing means trouble for us- it’s something others do to us, and at best it means harassment and being told we’re going to hell, at worst it means throwing us out of the country, killing us, or forcing us to convert to another religion. And then there’s the fact that proselytizing is something that goyim do, and doing as the goyim do is not popular in Judaism these days. Reform synagogues, for example, were quite a bit like churches in the 19th and early 20th centuries, but are moving away from that these days. There’s a revival of interest in distinctively Jewish wedding customs.
They don’t need to. They already have a billion Catholics in the world.
They’ve also changed their attitude toward members of other varieties of Christianity and members of other religions fairly recently. The Catholic Church doesn’t say that non-Catholics are automatically going to hell, so there’s less motivation to proselytize.
They’re also stretched a bit thin on personnel in countries like the US these days, so they need the priests they’ve got to minister to the Catholics they’ve got, not to be going out and trying to convert non-Catholics.
It’s generally more that they’re interested in quality, not quantity, in their converts, for the most part. They would rather have a few sincere converts actually living a Jewish life than a lot of converts who are only nominally Jewish. Orthodox standards for living a Jewish life are quite high, and that discourages a fair number of prospective converts.
Actually, it’s a little more complicated than that. You may be interested in this book.
Re the OP, it’s probably worth noting that the activity which we call proselytizing has corollaries in spheres other than religion. The guy who insists that you have to hear this Pink Floyd album, because it’ll “change your life,” and becomes angry when you dismiss him, is basically engaging in the same behavior. Ditto somebody who tries to force you to eat something new, or read a book, or whatever. They have had a world-altering experience, and they want to share it with everybody.
It’s interesting that when this action is performed under the heading of religion, it gets a verb all to itself, “to proselytize,” whereas non-religious versions of the behavior don’t really get such a strong word. “Advocacy” may be the closest, but it doesn’t really cut it. For that reason, personally, I use the word “proselytize” to describe all of these, because I think it fits best.
And that, I believe, suggests that the impulse to forcefully argue this kind of thing is actually hard-wired into our psychology, with different people manifesting this aspect of ourselves to varying degrees. Religious advocacy is different only to the extent that there’s a pre-existing framework by which people can rationalize and justify their desire to reach into and meddle with other people’s lives.
Cite?
Y’know, what with this being GQ and all. :dubious:
I know of the existence of many things but I may be more inclined to find out about them when an enthusiastic person tells me how inspired they are by them.
Yes. For a long time, there were Christians on the SW corner of Yonge and Dundas in Toronto, and Muslims on the NW corner, and the occasional fruitcake on the SE corner. There days, the SE corner is Dundas Square (they knocked down the jeans store), and the last time I went by, the Muslims were on the SW corner, and had upgraded to a table and an umbrella.
There are some sects where proselytizing is central to their religion. I had a brilliant friend (obtained a couple of ME patents as an undergrad) who took a couple of years off to go to a bible college. Their central belief was that it was their duty to get the word of God to as many people as possible and the students worked shifts covering secular college campuses. They didn’t really believe in charity, your fate was under God’s control, they just wanted to make sure you knew about Him.
Well, with reincarnation aren’t they kinda guaranteed a certain size base?
Huh, sounds very Fred Phelps. “You’re going to go to hell and there’s absolutely nothing you can do about it, but we’re going to keep screaming about it.”
Okay, I know this is veering into non-GQ territory, and I apologize for it, but I truly am curious: do those who try to convert others (especially the above-mentioned burn-in-hell types, but not limited to them) realize how unappealing this is to some people? Is it that they know but don’t care (“I’m doing “god’s work” which is clearly best”), or is the idea of not wanting to hear about god just so far from their personal beliefs it doesn’t even register?
I’m not sure why people proselytize. It doesn’t make much sense to me and really they don’t do much except tick me off so I am not sure what kind of progress they think they are making, but they really seem to feel that they are making a difference somehow.
Sometimes it makes me want to laugh when I see the woman talking about god and handing out pamphlets that say one of the signs of the apocolypse or evil or whatever is women preachers or when I see the man surrounded by signs covered in bible verses, yelling about the love of god, trying to share his message as people go out of their way to avoid him. I don’t know who truly gets converted because someone knocked on their door at 8 on a Saturday morning or because they got yelled at on the subway but I suppose somebody must because they simply will not stop knocking on doors or screaming their messages in the subway tunnels. Personally I would be a lot more likely to listen to what they had to say if they were helping the homeless or something instead of singing religious messages to me in grand central but I guess I am not their target audience anyway.
The Krishnas certainly proselytize, and that certainly grew out of a Hindu tradition. There are other active Hindu sects that proselytize, I believe, and there have been Hindu movements that did so quite actively in the past.
Probably the most extreme non-proselytizers would be groups like the Druze, who don’t even accept that anyone can convert to their religion. You have to be born into it.
So if a missionsary had a choice between saving someone from being hit by a bus and converting someone to their own brand of religion, the moral act would be to let the person be hit by the bus. Sign me up.