So,
Evangelists are pretty bad at their jobs.
By "Evangelists", for the purpose of this thread, I mean the people who are actually going out and doing grunt work of going out in public to try to convert people, save souls, whatever you want to call it. I try to keep definitions open when precision isn't super important.
Basically, every single person I've come across who had the motivation to actually get outside of their comfort zone and do the street team thing has been woefully unprepared for anyone who isn't a lapsed Christian ready to be cajoled into going to church.
Why is this?
From what I recall from my church when I was looking into missionary work as a teen, and from talking with people who have shown up on my doorstep or met on the street (I used to live in San Diego and would run into people from out of state coming to do stuff at the creationism institute there while on the light rail) the whole point of these kinds of outreach efforts are supposed to be about saving souls.
OTOH, 3/4ths of the US is explicitly Christian. These people are, by the tenets of evangelical's, already saved. So if the goal is to save souls, they need to actually go after people who don't already believe, but their entire arsenal is, again as far as I've seen, woefully inadequate.
This isn't, incidentally, just a problem with Christianity. I ran into this a little with wandering Buddhist monks in rural China, but not with the ones in the temples (who mostly just wanted to chill, talk about ethics to the extent we could since I don't speak much Mandarin, and explain the relationship between a belief in reincarnation and vegetarianism). Or, oh my, the Hari Krishna's I ran into while in Australia were just laughably bad at their job, but aside from the differences in content, it was not particularly any better or worse to describe Vishnu (or whatever) having the entrails of his enemies around his neck than to reiterate basic, evangelical protestant dogma to a non-believer. The strange thing for me is the process for why all the various people I've talked to (predominantly eva. Protestents, JW's. Mormons, HK's, some Buddhists [the ones in Hong Kong at least had some street magic sleight of hand that suckered in one of my Navy buddies while we were on shore leave] and a few minority religious [I used to leave near Portland, Or... so, yeah]
So, I suppose, the gist of this thread is the title.
"Why do religious canvassers have such terrible arguments?"
Evangelists are pretty bad at their jobs.
By "Evangelists", for the purpose of this thread, I mean the people who are actually going out and doing grunt work of going out in public to try to convert people, save souls, whatever you want to call it. I try to keep definitions open when precision isn't super important.
Basically, every single person I've come across who had the motivation to actually get outside of their comfort zone and do the street team thing has been woefully unprepared for anyone who isn't a lapsed Christian ready to be cajoled into going to church.
Why is this?
From what I recall from my church when I was looking into missionary work as a teen, and from talking with people who have shown up on my doorstep or met on the street (I used to live in San Diego and would run into people from out of state coming to do stuff at the creationism institute there while on the light rail) the whole point of these kinds of outreach efforts are supposed to be about saving souls.
OTOH, 3/4ths of the US is explicitly Christian. These people are, by the tenets of evangelical's, already saved. So if the goal is to save souls, they need to actually go after people who don't already believe, but their entire arsenal is, again as far as I've seen, woefully inadequate.
This isn't, incidentally, just a problem with Christianity. I ran into this a little with wandering Buddhist monks in rural China, but not with the ones in the temples (who mostly just wanted to chill, talk about ethics to the extent we could since I don't speak much Mandarin, and explain the relationship between a belief in reincarnation and vegetarianism). Or, oh my, the Hari Krishna's I ran into while in Australia were just laughably bad at their job, but aside from the differences in content, it was not particularly any better or worse to describe Vishnu (or whatever) having the entrails of his enemies around his neck than to reiterate basic, evangelical protestant dogma to a non-believer. The strange thing for me is the process for why all the various people I've talked to (predominantly eva. Protestents, JW's. Mormons, HK's, some Buddhists [the ones in Hong Kong at least had some street magic sleight of hand that suckered in one of my Navy buddies while we were on shore leave] and a few minority religious [I used to leave near Portland, Or... so, yeah]
So, I suppose, the gist of this thread is the title.
"Why do religious canvassers have such terrible arguments?"
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