RE: Proselytizing
July 1, 2010 at 12:35 am
(This post was last modified: July 1, 2010 at 12:36 am by tavarish.)
Personally, I troll religious neighborhoods and knock door to door to tell people that shit happens and it's game over when you die.
On a more serious note, while I do agree with much of what Penn has said in his shows, this is something I can't really get behind.
The road to hell is paved with good intentions. I'm sure the man he met was nice and kind-hearted, and I don't doubt that most Christians are generally good people, but when you preach things that no one demonstrably and definitively knows as truth, and then force it onto people (whole populations in some cases) for the sole purpose of gaining converts, it becomes a venue for a lot of shady shit to occur.
If I said that the only way for you to reach eternal happiness would be to burn your house down, and I genuinely believed it and cared about your potential well-being, would that be a moral act if I told as many people to burn their houses as possible?
Would it be a kind act to tell others about my beliefs and assume them as truths to force others into my ideology? How about giving them the fear of hell or prohibiting certain actions because my religious views conflict with their lifestyle choices?
I've spoken to a few door to door Jehovah's Witnesses - not in an argumentative tone, but more of a questioning tone. They gave me a copy of whatever book they had, and were on their way, and I was convinced that they believed what they were preaching. It didn't have an effect on me, but I would have rather done without it. I'm absolutely fine with religion as long as it doesn't intrude on how I'm living my life.
On a more serious note, while I do agree with much of what Penn has said in his shows, this is something I can't really get behind.
The road to hell is paved with good intentions. I'm sure the man he met was nice and kind-hearted, and I don't doubt that most Christians are generally good people, but when you preach things that no one demonstrably and definitively knows as truth, and then force it onto people (whole populations in some cases) for the sole purpose of gaining converts, it becomes a venue for a lot of shady shit to occur.
If I said that the only way for you to reach eternal happiness would be to burn your house down, and I genuinely believed it and cared about your potential well-being, would that be a moral act if I told as many people to burn their houses as possible?
Would it be a kind act to tell others about my beliefs and assume them as truths to force others into my ideology? How about giving them the fear of hell or prohibiting certain actions because my religious views conflict with their lifestyle choices?
I've spoken to a few door to door Jehovah's Witnesses - not in an argumentative tone, but more of a questioning tone. They gave me a copy of whatever book they had, and were on their way, and I was convinced that they believed what they were preaching. It didn't have an effect on me, but I would have rather done without it. I'm absolutely fine with religion as long as it doesn't intrude on how I'm living my life.
My blog: The Usual Rhetoric
