(March 5, 2011 at 12:13 pm)Minimalist Wrote:Quote:They were genuinely good people who were willing to risk their lives to help others.
Helping others? Or merely sticking their bullshit religion into a place dominated by another bullshit religion.
Maybe we need a whole thread to talk about the motivations of "missionaries?"
Well, regardless of whether you think that helping people spiritually counts as helping them, that's what they felt they were doing. That's what I meant by "good people," they just wanted to help people. Also keep in mind that most of what they did was deliver Bibles to remote congregations that wanted them. The people were already Christians and it meant a lot to them to have their own Bible to read. We take things like books for granted here, but people in some the places they went would walk ten to twenty miles just to get a Bible. A lot of poorer schools use them to teach children to read because it was the only book they had. I know a lot of people have this dogmatic, Bible-thumping image in their heads of missionaries, but most modern-day missionaries serve in areas where there is already a decent-sized Christian presence or even in villages that are entirely Christian. Most missionaries are there doing practical things, like being doctors or English teachers or providing care for orphans, and they are still called missionaries even if they never hand out a single track or "witness" to anybody.
There's a saying that a lot of missionaries live by, "preach the gospel, use words if necessary." It means that they believe that if they just help people out of love, they are living the gospel, they don't have to say anything. Minimalist, these are people who spend their whole lives raising children that people left on the side of the road, or caring for lepers in places where no one will go within a hundred feet of them. One missionary spent her whole life raising abandoned children in a little house in the hills of India that her husband built himself. She didn't just care for them, she adopted them, and when she died more than fifty of her children came to pay their respects. All she did was care for the forgotten children, she never walked around "street preaching" or anything, but she was called a missionary. If you want to know what motivates people like her, the answer is love.
I know that there are a lot of people who are closed-minded, angry, dogmatic, and judgmental in their approach to faith, but there are people like that in any group. I'm sure there are missionaries like that, heck, I know one, but you can't say that all Christians are closed-minded or ignorant and you can't say that all missionaries are "sticking their bullshit religion into a place dominated by another bullshit religion" because it's such a big group. There are Christians in every nation, cultural group, and profession on the planet. One of the men who died in the incident with the Somali Pirates was a man named Scott Adam. I said that he and his wife were good people not only because of what they were trying to do, it's just what I heard from everybody that knew them. He had worked in the film industry for years (I think he worked on "Loveboat" and "The Goonies" and a bunch of other stuff), but he got burnt out, had a change of heart, and decided to sail the world delivering Bibles with his wife to churches that would never have gotten them otherwise. They loved it, and the churches were very grateful. I've heard Scott had a "colorful" sense of humor and was not the kind of guy you would think was a missionary. Who knows, you might have even liked him.
