messenjaH responds to me:
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I'm not saying they're not christians,
Yes, you are.
Let me point something out to you. EVEN (GASP!) CHRISTIANS MAKE MISTAKES.
That's backpedaling, messenjaH.
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I (even with your quotes from past posts of mine) never said they were not christians.
Yes, you did.
Message 7
Ok, but christian missionaries DON'T do that.
And yet, you have been presented with examples of them doing that. Your response, for example, not NosyNed's description of the Salvation Army's adding 'a little "salvation' to it's food services"? To say that they were not true Christians:
Message 9
If they are practicing what God instructs them to do they aren't.
You even sneer quoted them, messenjah:
Message 16
The christians on the board explain these wrongful acts performed by fellow "christians".
What was the point of putting those sneer quotes around the word "christians" if not to point out that you don't consider these people to be "true" Christians, messenjaH?
This is not just a question of you saying that they are Christians but mistaken. Yes, you have said that, but your other statements show that attitude to be a false one. You don't think these people are "true" Christians.
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There you go, messenjaH. These missionaries are using a class in English instruction as a way to evangelize to people.
They provide education for their students and yes they try to educate their students using the Bible. What's wrong with that?
It's exploitative and evil.
If they were truly concerned about teaching English, they wouldn't turn it into a course in evangelization.
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The Bible is a profound piece of literature.
So? They're not using it as a piece of literature. They say so directly. They're using the class as a tool to evangelize.
That's exploitative and evil.
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They're not forcing anyone to believe are they?
Yes, they are.
If you want to learn, you're going to learn at the knee of our religion.
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The teachers simply show the students what they believe.
No, they don't. They show the students what the students are expected to believe.
That's what evangelization is for, messenjaH, and the mission directly states that such is the point of the class. You don't teach English because you think it would be a good thing for the people to learn. Instead, you teach English so that you can proselytize and convert the heathen.
That's exploitative and evil.
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Yes as children they would have tendencies to believe many things, but that doesn't mean they can't make up their minds.
(*blink!*)
You didn't just say that, did you?
What else are they going to learn? They're being sent to school to learn. The school has a captive audience. The school is not teaching anything except Christianity. Therefore, what do you think is going to be the outcome?
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although I could see he was dismayed. As he had great reason to be...
BZZZZT!
Pascal's Wager. I'm so sorry, messenjaH. Johnny, tell him what parting gifts he has!
Well, Bob, messenjaH has won himself a lifetime of anguish in someone else's hell! Yes, that's right. After spending all of his life fighting against Satan and worshipping the Christian god, messenjaH gets a reward of going straight to Hades for his hubris. He'll be sentenced to solve a series of puzzles for which the instructions can be read in many ways. Every attempt to glean more information will be met with "Since it would just be a waste of my time to tell you, I won't." Of course, every proposed solution will conflict with something in the contradictory instructions. This being for his continued insistence that those around him are unworthy of explanations.
But, he won't get hungry because he'll have an afterlife-time supply of Rice-a-Roni, the San Francisco Treat.
You didn't really think that the god that truly exists is the Christian one, did you?
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But the point is, noone is forcing anyone to accept Jesus, missionaries respect free will.
BWAHAHAHAHA!
Oh, that's just precious, messenjaH!
You really don't see it, do you? You just got finished talking about how your friend was in danger of going to hell and you then have the audacity to say that "noone [sic] is forcing anyone to accept Jesus"?
What is a threat of peril to one's soul if not an attempt to force somebody to do something?
Do you seriously think that unless somebody holds a literal gun to your head, there is no coercion?
You know...I've asked you that question before, too, and you didn't answer it then, either.
Again, I have to ask: Is there some number of times I have to ask you a question before you deign to consider responding to it? Or is it simply going to be a habit of yours that you refuse to respond to honest inquiry into your positions?
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Rhrain's logic in a different (yet similar?) situation:
Children are told of evolution and billions of years since an early age. I sure was. I was gullible, I accepted the theory. I have been forced to attend school and of course science class. If anything is forced, it is the theory of evolution. Most science courses contain it and the teachers convey the theory as fact,
Incorrect.
Nobody conveys the theory as fact. That would be a stupid thing to do since theories are not facts. Instead, theories are based on facts. If you missed this important distinction, it's because you failed to grasp the information in your lessons.
You cannot have a theory without a fact to base it upon. Evolution is both a theory and a fact. However, the theory is not the fact and the fact is not the theory. There's a reason it is called the theory
OF evolution. That's because evolution is observed.
When we observe populations of organisms over time, they change. Because we use language and haven't managed to perfect that telepathy thing, we use a word to describe this change. That word happens to be "evolution." But that observation doesn't tell us anything about how it happened. For example, how are characteristics transferred from one generation to the next? Lamarck had physical characteristics acquired after birth being capable of being transferred to offspring. Thus, the giraffe's neck got longer because the living giraffes that had spent time reaching with their necks for leaves would have experienced an environmentally-caused elongation of the neck and that trait would be transferred to the offspring. Darwin, however, disagreed: Physical characteristics are intrinsic to the organism and environmentally-caused traits don't get passed on. By Lamarck's logic, a person who had lost his left arm would then have children who didn't have a left arm...which never happens. Instead, the population of giraffes had individuals with varying neck lengths and those with longer necks would be better capable of reaching the better leaves and thus be more likely to have offspring, thus transferring the longer neck trait on.
Now notice: The actual reason for the giraffe's long neck as proffered isn't true. It seems that giraffe's have long necks due to sexual selection: Male giraffes fight by "necking." The fights can become so vicious that necks are broken. Thus, having a longer, stronger neck is better. But the specific reason for the selection is irrelevant to the point that there is a selective process going on: Something makes an organism with one physical characteristic more likely to reproduce than others, and thus that characteristic gets passed on to the next generation.
But all of this is predicated on the observation that giraffe necks get longer over time as observed in the fossil record of their bodies. The giraffes evolved. There is no denying this fact. Evolution takes place.
The
theory OF evolution seeks to explain how that
observed fact OF evolution takes place.
Therefore, since your scenario is based upon a false premise, the entire conclusion is discarded out of hand.
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So is a guy pelting me with Charles Darwin and Stephen Hawkings books while he knows I'm a christian being a jerk?
If you're in the library reading the latest publication of your religious tradition, yes. The guy is being a jerk. He didn't ask you. You didn't ask him. Neither of you are in a place that is set aside for such discussions. Therefore, what on earth is he doing?
I notice you don't complain about being taught spelling ("Why should I have to follow somebody else's rules? Wy kant I du it thuh whay I wahnt tu?") or mathematics ("How dare you force me to believe that 2 + 2 = 4!")
You only seem to have this problem with evolution.
Since evolution is more soundly grounded in scientific examination than gravity (we actually have a mechanism for evolution...we still don't rightly know what gravity is or how it works), one wonders why you have such a bug up your butt about it. You don't complain about children being taught that if they were to jump off the Empire State Building, they would plummet to their deaths because gravity would pull them down. You don't complain about models of the solar system that put the sun at the center, in direct contradiction to the Bible. You don't complain about the germ "theory" of disease showing that illnesses are brought on by microorganisms, in direct contradiction to the Bible.
But in this one case, you suddenly claim that there is some Conspiracy to Suppress the Truth .
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Rrhain
WWJD? JWRTFM!
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