My encounters have been mixed. It depends on the preacher.
Normally I try to avoid confrontation. I'll take their tract or whatever and then go about my business. However on one occasion I was attending a local atheist "meet up" group. After a couple of drinks, the hosts of this group decided to in their own words "bother the god botherers". So we found the local street preacher and challenged him on his preaching. In retrospect this was childish, but hey, I'd had a few. There appeared to be two approaches to his preaching. Myself and my friends that evening engaged with the preacher in debate and logical reasoning, which was admittedly futile , whereas some of my fellow atheist "meet ups" trolled the guy into saying something ridiculous and then belittled him for it (eg. that the universe is approx 6000 years old). I'd have to say that neither approach was productive but I found that ridicule was particularly counter-productive and only served to cement theists' baseless prejudices about us atheists. Since that day I have been more reserved concerning street preachers. If I'm in the mood I'll ask questions, but I'll rarely challenge them unless they say something that's demonstrably false.
In fact I have recently befriended a wandering evangelist. It seems that this guy's purpose in life is to wander the streets of my suburb spreading the word of the lord. All he seems to say is "god bless you" or "Jesus loves you". Other than that he has never tried to proselytise or bible bash me or anyone else I know of for that matter. Perhaps because of this and the fact that I am one of the few people willing to give him the time of day, we have struck up an unlikely friendship. We talk religion, politics, sport, and some of his evangelist stories can be entertaining. I'm not entirely sure what the purpose of this story is, but I guess that my point is that street preachers may seem condescending in that they think they have all the answers, but they're not all bad.
Normally I try to avoid confrontation. I'll take their tract or whatever and then go about my business. However on one occasion I was attending a local atheist "meet up" group. After a couple of drinks, the hosts of this group decided to in their own words "bother the god botherers". So we found the local street preacher and challenged him on his preaching. In retrospect this was childish, but hey, I'd had a few. There appeared to be two approaches to his preaching. Myself and my friends that evening engaged with the preacher in debate and logical reasoning, which was admittedly futile , whereas some of my fellow atheist "meet ups" trolled the guy into saying something ridiculous and then belittled him for it (eg. that the universe is approx 6000 years old). I'd have to say that neither approach was productive but I found that ridicule was particularly counter-productive and only served to cement theists' baseless prejudices about us atheists. Since that day I have been more reserved concerning street preachers. If I'm in the mood I'll ask questions, but I'll rarely challenge them unless they say something that's demonstrably false.
In fact I have recently befriended a wandering evangelist. It seems that this guy's purpose in life is to wander the streets of my suburb spreading the word of the lord. All he seems to say is "god bless you" or "Jesus loves you". Other than that he has never tried to proselytise or bible bash me or anyone else I know of for that matter. Perhaps because of this and the fact that I am one of the few people willing to give him the time of day, we have struck up an unlikely friendship. We talk religion, politics, sport, and some of his evangelist stories can be entertaining. I'm not entirely sure what the purpose of this story is, but I guess that my point is that street preachers may seem condescending in that they think they have all the answers, but they're not all bad.
- The Mgt.
