Roger J. Wendell
Defending 3.8 Billion Years of Organic EvolutionSM
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Proselytizing, missionary "work," and other bad habits...
0. Proselytizing Definition: |
Evangelical Christianity has gotten a little out of hand here in America. As this page will demonstrate, if a restaurant owner isn't trying to convert me over a cup of coffee, or my own baseball team (the Colorado Rockies) isn't trying to win me over to their brand of Christianity, then Uncle Sam's very own military (the Air Force Academy just an hour south of my house) is pushing its interpretation of the Bible onto subordinates. This is NOT what America is about!Okay, freedom of speech and expression should never be stopped or discouraged. And, I can understand how excited a person can become over a personal philosophy (everyone knows how much I, myself, "pushed" recycling and composting in the 90s!!). However, isn't it a little bizarre that certain Christian sects are so insecure that they feel it necessary to shout their views at captive recruits, casual passersby, or baseball fans?? I know, this little page isn't going to change anyone's mind. However, with a little luck (and a few thousand page hits) word might get out that a lot of us don't appreciate the religious views of others being forced upon us - especially when we're trying to enjoy a cup of coffee at McDonald's or a hotdog at the baseball park. And, of course, Christian "missionary" work is an intrusion into the lives of others that deserves a page all of its own (unfortunately I don't have time for that, at the moment...)...
- Roger J. Wendell
Airline Proselytizing:
On February 9, 2004 CNN.com posted an article, by Tracy Sabo, titled:
Pilot's proselytizing scares passengersThe article described how a pilot, on a February 6th American Airlines flight from Los Angeles
to New York, proselytized to his crew and passangers once the flight was underway. Passenger Jen
Dorsey said, "We were just at the beginning of our flight. The pilot came on to greet everyone and
give his comments for the morning, and he said he'd recently been on a mission trip, and he'd like
all the Christians to please raise their hands."Passanger Karla Austin confirmed the pilot announced, "If you are a Christian, raise your hand." Austin
said the pilot added, "If you are not, you're crazy."The article suggests that none of the passangers raised their hands with many becoming worried enough
to start using their cell phones in addition to complaining to the flight crew.The article reported that the pilot, later in the flight, apologized. Passagner Dorsey said, "He came
on and said, 'I want to apologize for my comments earlier. I think I really threw the flight crew off
a little bit, and they are getting a lot of flack for the things I said. So I want to apologize to my
flight crew."The CNN article stated an American Airline spokesman, Tim Wagner, said the pilot denies using the word
"crazy." Mr. Wagoner stated, "He told the airline he recently had returned from a mission trip and was
encouraging people to use the four and a half hour flight to speak with passengers about their relationships
with God."The article ended without identifying the pilot and quoting Spokesman Wagoner as saying the incident will
be "...handled internally according to American Airlines procedure."
Penny Proselytizing:
A penny for your thoughts?As if having the government printing "official" religious messages on our money isn't enough, some Christians now go to great lengths to deface it with their own messages. I've seen all kinds of scribbled and stamped messages, on my dollars bills, reminding me that "Jesus saves" (thrifty Jesus!), the end is near, or that a certain Bible verse is near-and-dear to someone's heart. We'll, I never thought to photograph any of this religious graffiti until I found this unique little carving of a crucifix in my pocket change one day. I can't even imagine all the trouble a certain Christian went through to carve out a cross, in this penny, but I sure wish he hadn't!!
Fast Food Proselytizing:
 (Click on this image for a clearer view of the receipt) |
On October 26th, 2003 my friend Stu and his wife Nancy were driving through Longview, Texas when he decided to stop at McDonald's for a cup of coffee. Not only did the coffee cost him an entire dollar (There was an 8 cent "Take out" tax) but the cash register receipt said the following: "Bread of deceit is sweet to man; but afterwards his mouth shall be filled with gravel. Pro 20:17 May God Bless You." After seeing a copy of the receipt, with my own eyes, I started to wonder if McDonald's cash registers will ever quote Buddha or Mohamed? |
Goofy Proselytizing:
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This photo (left) has been floating around the Internet for awhile so I thought I'd post it here as a reminder of how goofy religion can get. If there is a God, I doubt he or she hates anything. And I especially doubt that same God has any concerns about a person's sexuality - my guess is God has a lot more important stuff to be worrying about. Of course that's just my guess as who can know the mind of God? |
| In April 2005 I found myself in San Francisco only to discover even more proselytizers. The guy with the florescent green sign was actually a bit theatrical in that he continuously twirled his sign until he saw me and my camera. Then, of course, he stopped and posed for this momement of fame... |
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Military Proselytizing: (Oh, the irony in it!) Throughout much of 2003, 2004 and 2005 complaints continued to surface over the treatment of non-Christian cadets at the Air Force Academy in Colorado Springs, Colorado. In June, 2005 the Air Force established a set of guidelines to stop the heavy-handed tactics of the religious-right. Here are exerpts from a Rocky Mountain News article on the subject: |
AF: Thou shalt respect diversity
By Dick Foster, Rocky Mountain News
August 30, 2005
"COLORADO SPRINGS - New Air Force guidelines on religious tolerance discourage public prayer in most official settings and caution senior officers and chaplains to respect religious diversity."The Rocky Mountain News piece also went on to describe how others don't believe the guidelines will go far enough to curb abuses by an Air Force leadership that favors evagelical Christian docrine:"The guidelines, two months in the making, strike at charges that members of minority faiths have been targets of slurs and discrimination by members of the Air Force Academy's evangelical Christian majority."
"Although the academy is at the center of the controversy, the guidelines will be applied across the entire Air Force and probably all service branches, an Air Force official said Monday."
The Air Force grounds its new guidelines in the Constitution, reminding its members of their oath to protect the "free exercise of religion and prohibition against governmental establishment of religion."
"The guidelines caution senior officers to be 'sensitive' that their own personal religious expressions might be seen by subordinates as official endorsements."
They direct chaplains to 'respect the rights of others to their own religious beliefs, including the right to hold no belief.'"
"These are not matters of simple personal misunderstanding between individuals. They are, particularly in the hands of leadership, severe constitutional violations that should not be tolerated in the Air Force," said MeLinda Morton, an Air Force chaplain who resigned her commission in June after accusing other academy chaplains of proselytizing cadets.""Morton called for congressional oversight of religious tolerance efforts at the academy and throughout the service."
"Chaplains and senior officers were the subject of the most serious charges of religious intolerance dating back to at least 2003, say those involved in the controversy."
"Members of a Yale Divinity School team reported witnessing a chaplain exhort new cadets in June 2004 to tell non-believing cadets that those not 'born again will burn in the fires of hell.'"
"Brig. Gen. John Weida, the commandant of cadets, second-highest ranking officer at the academy, encouraged cadets to proselytize, according to a June 2005 Air Force report on the academy's intolerance problem. Weida apologized for his actions in June. His promotion to major general has been postponed by Congress."
"Bruce DeBoskey, regional director of the Anti-Defamation League, was hopeful but cautious about the new rules. "The guidelines appear to say the right things, but the question is how will they be implemented," said DeBoskey. ADL and others will closely monitor the implementation."
"'If the same people who have been the source of the problem are going to be implementing the changes without meaningful training, then we have a problem,' he said."
Fire the military chaplains!
In 2007 Al Sharpton and Christopher Hitchens engaged in a public
debate on religion and Hitchens' book, God is not Great at the
New York Public Library on May 7th, 2007. A member of the audience
advised both that his brother was a successful, sought-after military
chaplain and wanted the debaters' opinion on the matter. Christopher
Hitchens responded:
"I don't think that we should be paying for chaplains. I don't think the U.S. government should be employing any. James Madison coauthor of the Virginia statute on religious freedom and of the first amendment was very adamant on the point and was very clear, it's flat out unconstitutional to pay or employ a chaplain to open the proceedings of congress or to be in the armed forces. We can't have chaplains on our payroll and that's that."
Missionary "Work:"
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I'd often thought, ever since I was a pre-teen in the late 60s (when Christian aggressiveness was on the rise), that there couldn't be anything more arrogant than going to another country to force your religious views on others - especially when those others haven't had educational or economic opportunities to raise their standard of living much above the subsistence level. In other words, it's inappropriate to preach and pass Bibles around an impoverished community in an effort to convert somebody, to what much of the world sees as a questionable religion anyway, at a time when there are more important/honest needs to be met!
Add to this arrogance the fact that many Christians represent (and support) a system that exploits nature, the land, and indigenous peoples and you have a missionary quest that resembles nothing more than economic conquest! And, if I were the target of Christian missionary practices I would be especially angered about their practice of sending pimply-faced 20 year olds to convince me that their religion was superior to something that may have provided my community spiritual satisfaction for thousands of years - possibly predating the Bible itself!
Golden, Colorado - August 2005 |
In an article titled; Missionary zeal: To convert or comfort?
(Sunday Denver Post April 10, 2005, p. 5e)
Colorado Voices Columnist Danielle Steinfeld said;
"That beggar [an Indian Hindu with an elephantine leg in Kuala Lumpur] never had the fortune, or misfortune, to see an American missionary. He couldn't have reached a church on his own legs, and no missionary was looking to reel him in to sanctuary. He didn't need to be converted to Christianity to save his soul. He needed something more basic: food to survive, and medical treatment for his disfiguring disease."His religion already worked fine for him, it preached generosity to the sick, the poor, the starving. That was all he needed - the gererosity of those who had more than he."
The money raised by our Christian missionaries was never meant for him. That money went into saving souls, not saving lives. It was money misspent, just like the Bibles provided to the orphans of the recent tsunami [Indian Ocean Tsunami of December 26, 2004]."
As I grew up, I began to notice that Christianity doesn't pay much attention to saving lives. It puts membership first. As long as you're a member of a congregation, or ofa mission in a Third World country, you count. But if youhaven't been saved yet, you're still invisibile. You might as well be a beggar with elephantasis.""
Missionaries in Hawai'i:
James A. Michener, from his 1958 classic, Hawaii
"In one sense Abner did profit: he got each of his parishioners properly dressed for the opening of church, and on the Sunday when the sprawling edifice was consecrated, curious processions from miles around marched through the dust in their unaccustomed finery from Captain Janders' store. . . . Had Abner studied the climate for even a moment, he would have built his grass walls only a few feet high, leaving open space between them and the roof so that air could circulate, but churches in New England were built foursquare, and so they were in Hawaii, with no air stirring and the congregation sweltering in the natural heat, plus the radiation of three thousand closely packed bodies."
Doing Good for God
Sam Harris, from his book, Letter to a Christian Nation, pp. 33-34
"What about all of the good things people have done in the name of God? It is undeniable that many people of faith make heroic sacrifices to relieve the suffering of other human beings. But is it necessary to believe anything on insufficient evidence in order to behave this way? If compassion were really dependent upon religious dogmatism, how could we explain the work of secular doctors in the most war ravaged regions of the developing world? Many doctors are moved simply to alleviate human suffering, without any thought of God. While there is no doubt that Christian missionaries are also moved by a desire to alleviate suffering, they come to the task encumbered by a dangerous and divisive mythology. Missionaries in the developing world waste a lot of time and money (not to mention the goodwill of non-Christians) proselytizing to the needy; they spread inaccurate information about contraception and sexually transmitted disease, and they withhold accurate information. While missionaries do many noble things at great risk to themselves, their dogmatism still spreads ignorance and death. By contrast, volunteers for secular organizations like Doctors Without Borders do not waste any time telling people about the virgin birth of Jesus. Nor do they tell people in sub-Saharan Africa - where nearly four million people die from AIDS every year - that condom use is sinful. Christian missionaries have been known to preach the sinfulness of condom use in villages where no other information about condoms is available. This kind of piety is genocidal. We might also wonder, in passing, which is more moral: helping people purely out of concern for their suffering, or helping them because you think the creator of the universe will reward you for it?"
Worse than Proselytizing:
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"The Catholic Inquisition published the book that arguably could be called the most blood-soakd publication in human history. Malleus Maleficarum - or The Witches' Hammer - indoctrinated the world to 'the dangers of freethinking women' and instructed the clergy how to locate, torture, and destroy them. Those deemd 'witches' by the Church included all female scholars, priestesses, gypsies, mystics, nature lovers, herb gatherers, and any women "suspiciously attuned to the natural world." Midwives also were killed for their heretical practice of using medical knowledge to ease the pain of childbirth - a suffering, the Church claimed, that was God's rightful punishment for Eve's partaking of the Apple of Knowledge, thus giving birth to the idea of Original Sin. During three hundred years of witch hunts, the Church burned at the stake an astounding five million women."
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