And that is a lot to bring to the table when judging the actions of a group in Korea and especially a group of people who have virtually no firsthand knowledge of.

But, the trend in higher edcuation to, as I put it, pull the trigger much more quickly on turning the eye on Christianity, while having the tendancy to turn quickly the rose colored glasses gaze on religion and philosophy that origniated in the Other. Part of it is that it is easier to criticize something you have some amount of intituive feeling about since it is so much a part of your culture’s social history. We just don’t have that type of understanding with Buddhism, Confucianism, or Hinduism or other. We come to them usually via philosophy departments, and they generall stick to the positive and the theoretical. I know neo-Confucianism in the history departments of Korea and in general discourse on Korea’s history has been ripped to shreds in a variety of ways…

One of the things I’ve enjoyed over the last couple of years is freedom to my reading wander whereever my fancy wanted to take me. Part of that time has been looking to fill in some black holes in my reading on world history. This discussion made me decide to focus some attention on India. I can’t get to library until later, but I did some googling, and I found this quote interesting in light of our discussion…

Also, I want to slip in only one thought from me — this passage and thoughts about the discussion on monotheism leading to blind faith and intolerance and conflict with non-believers made me think of this —- the Greek and Roman Empires were polytheistic….

http://www.indianchild.com/indian_kingdoms.htm

The victory of good over evil is epitomized in the epic Ramayana (The Travels of Rama, or Ram in the preferred modern form), while another epic, Mahabharata (Great Battle of the Descendants of Bharata), spells out the concept of dharma and duty. More than 2,500 years later, Mohandas Karamchand (Mahatma) Gandhi, the father of modern India, used these concepts in the fight for independence (see Mahatma Gandhi, this ch.). The Mahabharata records the feud between Aryan cousins that culminated in an epic battle in which both gods and mortals from many lands allegedly fought to the death, and the Ramayana recounts the kidnapping of Sita, Rama’s wife, by Ravana, a demonic king of Lanka (Sri Lanka), her rescue by her husband (aided by his animal allies), and Rama’s coronation, leading to a period of prosperity and justice. In the late twentieth century, these epics remain dear to the hearts of Hindus and are commonly read and enacted in many settings. In the 1980s and 1990s, Ram’s story has been exploited by Hindu militants and politicians to gain power, and the much disputed Ramjanmabhumi, the birth site of Ram, has become an extremely sensitive communal issue, potentially pitting Hindu majority against Muslim minority.

I got caught up in the thoughts of the discussion at the same time my wife was wanting me to do a few things and talk to me about a few mundane things and then drive her some where, and I type very fast, and having my brain pressed too much while letting my fingers go, I got carried away and screwed up a lot….

I hope at least the large majority of it made some sense…..

I don’t think you can lay thought out as a blanket, obvious charge.

We can’t say that all people who are converted are done so by coersion and/or were brainwashed because they were spiritually weak at the time.

Yes. I agree we have to consider seriously the fact that the areas were missionaries make the biggest headway is in nations that are poor and in turmoil. And as I said conversions within a society that is stable often comes after a period of personal crisis.

But, do we really have the place to say that by and large, these conversions are not healthy?

That they have nothing to do with health?

Or that they are even generally deterimental?

I wonder what the recoversion rate is in the third world areas?

Has large scale conversion or significant numbers of converts in certain societies (in the modern/contemporary setting) led to greater misery and social strife?

Have we seen that enough to come to a general conclusion about the general situation?

Do we know enough in the general setting or about these specific Korean missionaries to conclude the deserve to be called lunatics and clearly bad people setting out to do what is ultimately a bad thing?

And what happened to free will?

I agree the emotionally disturbed or unlearned being primary targets for conversion is a good point….

but are they really brainwashed beyond repair?

Is human will really degraded so much in most of these conversions in the Third World or whereever —

that the converted become a lost cause, because

if they don’t come to their senses and revert away from the conversion…

…they simply prove they were too well brainwashed at the beginning to ever help themselves get out of that bad mindset?

The poor converted will either snap out of it in the future or risk being written off as lost causes to the negative forces of Christianity???

I don?€™t think that poor children in areas still recovering from war are able to have an informed discussion with these missionaries about the impact of Christianity on the region. No, they were young and poor, and looked upon these bringers of ?€śtechnology?€? and fun as great people.”

I can see this. But to play devil’s advocate, did the beauties of Christianity wear off on them?

Did they wake up to realize how they had been terribly mislead and are ashamed of themselves for having had such weak self-will at the moment of conversion?

Along another line —- are we applying a Star Trek prime directive here?

I don’t mean that to sound snotty. As I said, I can see and feel the dislike for changing people’s minds on something as big as religious faith at a time of personal/emotional weakness and I see it as a very valid point, but does that mean you have to avoid those places that are not socially healthy if you aer a missionary? or individuals who are at a moment of crisis?

Let me put it this way, how often do we think people who are not religious come to find religion through a moment of crisis?

What would we guess are the percentages in those who seek religion out of a period of personal crisis vs those who do so out of a well-reasoned, critical process of self and social evaluation?

(I mean that as a legitimate question, because I have seen where people have convereted to and from Christianity, Buddhism, and Islam through a planned comparison.)

If we limit conversion from one religion to another or from non-faith to faith as mostly done in a moment of crisis, and if a big part of our derision of people like the Korean Christian missionaries is based on reason and critical thinking, how far along the line are we travelling toward a conclusion that all religion is blind and for the emotionally and/or mentally weak? Say, a Ted Turner opinion?

“Be a good Christian. That is great. Help people. Also great. But work on yourslef and help people in a more constructive manner. When your personal choice is to head off to Iraq to save the heathen from their terrible beliefs, your Christianity and thought processes are misguided.”

OK. Right there. “Help people in a more constructive manner.”

The missionaries would say that they are being helpful in the most important manner. They would say if the person they are reaching out to is a good Christian, he/she would not only find eternal peace after death, but that following the faith would also help with emotional and social well being — as long as they weren’t killed by a Muslim fundamentalist who the conversion pissed off to the point of murder…..

Is the retort that they are only achieving conversions because they can “brainwash” the people because they are weak willed and not worldly enough a strong arguement?

I’m not sure. Maybe.

But what it some of those poor weak willed bastards go through the rest of their lives as a Christian and die happily?

What if some years later, when they are back on their feet and in a more comfortable setting, they decide they were duped and toss Christianity aside? Kind of like Larry Flint?

How much harm has been done to either hypothetical person converted? Even Larry Flint might have taken one or two positive things from his limited time of conversion…

“Does anyone really think that what the people of Iraq really need is Koreans trying to teach them about Christianity? If you do something is terribly wrong. And those that head off to do this type of work have something wrong in their minds.”

Here comes one of my yada yada epiphanies….

At I think the 25th anniversary of Monty Python’s Flying Circus in the US, a couple of guys in that hillarious group of Brits said that they agreed the Life of Brian was the best work they had done.

They said that they had sat down to right a Python type skewering of the culture of Christianity or Christianity or whatever, so they startd reading the New Testement, and, as they said themselves, they quickly realized it was hard to lambast “Love they neighbor as thyself.”

So, having been forced to take a slight moment of reconsideration from what they had origninally thought would be an easy rip-roaring job, they looked around and decided what needed the ripping apart was the obvious history of organized Christianity — so they came up with the idea of Brian — someone who would parallel the path of Jesus, but whose adventures would point out how people had a way of fucking up “Love thy neighbor as thyself.”

I would think a heavy dose of “Love thy neighbor as thyself” would be a damn good message for the Iraqis and Afghans.

Of course, even I have serious doubts about how well the Korean missionaries are going to stay on message, but I don’t know anything about this specific group. I don’t know if they are going to lead Iraqi Christians to take up guns and force their once fellow Muslims to “covert or die” but I highly doubt it.

It seems to me the arguement we’ve been hearing in this discussion hasn’t been that the blind Christianity we expect the Koreans to teach the Iraqis or Afghanistans is only going to lead them to kill their fellow countrymen. Instead the criticism, at least how I read it, was that their conversion was terrible because it was going to lead their fellow countrymen to kill them….

If that is the case, a heavy dose of hearing “love thy neighbor love they neighbor love thy neighbor” whether it converts them or not, might not be too bad a message to hear.

Of course, if they repeat street preaching from Seoul that the Muslims are going to burn in hell if they don’t convert, I doubt the body count is going to lower at all….

But, again, I don’t know if these Korean Christians that started this good discussion are going over with bandaids and “you’re going to hell” or “love thy neighbor”….

But, my main point is that I don’t agree that anybody who thinks something good might come from the work of these missionaries is a delusional fool.

I think they are nuts because it is so dangerous over there. I would think the same about a group of nurses going over there without an agreement they would be protected by the military.

But, I don’t see how I have enough information to give a good guess at a conclusion that there is no way they will accomplish anything good because they are Christian missionaries.

Let me have another one of my epiphanies….as I was writing that part above, I wanted to slip in a comment about Ghandi, but I somewhat missed the right point to do so.

Ghandi was not a Christian, but he understood the value of “Turn the other cheek” and “love thy neighbor.” He beat the hell out of those two drums in India — when religious sectarian slaughter was gong on at the same time colonial slaughter was too.

And those two messages that he beat again and again and again reached around and extended into the ears of a Christian, Babptist preacher in the southern US — Martin Luther King Jr. And during a very bad period in (Christian) American society — in the Bible belt of all places — where the idea of “love thy neighbor” had been buried for a long time (when it came to minorities) and in the whole of the United States where the theme of “turn the other” cheek looked like it was going to go the way of “burn baby burn” — King’s bringing up of Ghandi and echoing him and beating those same drums constantly, even in the face of bodily harm and death, helped get American society, especially the Bible belt, remember some of those forgotten or unpracticed aspects of Christianity, and the US climded away from a second civil war and the frequent bloodshed that was on our city streets.

So again, I can’t tell whether those Christian missionaries from Korea are going to work good, ill, or indifference in Iraq or Afghanistan. I think they are taking too big a risk, but……not to push this point too far…..if I were Martin Luther King Jr.’s or Ghandi’s father, I’d told them to look after their own family too.

I’m not saying the comparison is valid or that the example of King and Ghandi negatives what might very well be the wrongheaded approach to life those Korean missionaries might have or might not have.

I’m just not sure I can lay on their shoulders all the ills I know religious intolernace has caused in Western social history and in the social history of other places….

On the Iraq War II and the fact that Christian fundamentalists are in support of it meaning they are just in the same league as suicide bombers —

that would be true if you thought the outwardly Christians who support the war are doing so with religion as the primary or a key reason for that support….

If you believed their support for the war was based on some desire to repeat the Crusades — that they believed the war in Iraq was justified in large part as a planting of the Christian flag, by military force, in the Muslim Middle East. To push the point too far on my part —- that Bush is Richard the Lionheart and Hussein really was what he claimed (however sincerely) that he was the modern Saladin.

But I have returned in the last couple of years to the Bible belt in the US, and I don’t hear a whole lot of people justify the war as a war of religion to over through the Muslim faith in Iraq. I don’t hear people really saying it is a Holy War.

I might hear too many people saying they expect WMDs to be dug up at any momement in the sands of Iraq, but I don’t hear a lot of people saying we had to go to war in the name of Christ.

In fact, if they were a lot of that going on around here, we probably wouldn’t see the articles in the press about the need for exit strategies due to the dropping popularity of the struggle over there.

On what Virtual Wanderer said, my earlier swipe at science and reason and things like Darwinism turing into Social Darwinism — which Japanese society ate like hot cakes, along with the toys western industrialism helped them make, to then turn against the Korean and most of Asia, to do what? Accomplish what their pre-modern, non-Darwinianized forefarthers had tried hard to do before all that — namley conquer the rest of Asia —- was meant to swipe at the religion of science.

We have great minds like Stephan Hawkins boldly claiming in a book for mathmatical morans like me that our great scientific, post-modern world was on the threshold of seeing the mysteries of the universe boiled down into one single equation, and many of the other great intellectual minds of the day and a large measure of those dedicated to the religion of science say, “Wow! That’s great!” and my knee-jerk reaction is to say, “Oh for fuck
s sake….”

Why? Because I look back at the history of civilization and realize that every 300 years or so, even the average educated moran like me, or even down to the not so educated moran, looks back at some of the most cherished ideas held by the greatest minds of so long ago held, and he thinks, “How could the people back then have been so fucking stupid?” (To quote Kim Jong Il via Team America).

No no solid scientific reason I can really understand, I personally think a couple of hundred years from now middle schoolers are going to look back at the Big Band Theory and wonder what the fuck we were smoking…..”

I simply cannot contemplate an absolute nothingness. I know science tells me I’m a complete idiot if I don’t believe before the big bang happened, there was not only a nothingness, but not even space (or area). Sorry. My brain just can’t handle it. Complete nothingness. Nothiness void of even time and space. Nope. My head will explode if I try to cram that in. All this mind-boggling huge amount of matter and space simply popped from no where?

I know Lucretius was fossilized before Stephan Hawkins was born or before the Big Bang Theory was discovered as proven by science — but when I ran across his idea that something can’t come from nothing and something can’t become a true nothing, that made a hell of lot more sense to me.

Later, I also read a book called, The Big Bang Never Happened — whose title appealed to me for obvious reasons.

I recommend the book, because if you can get over what is really a cheesy title, it is written by someone who knows enough about math and cosmology to write an interesting book that takes the dominate strain of science today to task. He argues that around the time of Einstein and definately after him, cosmology and too much of science became math oriented — that it went from observing nature and working out the math, it went to working out the math then pushing the observations of nature to fit that. He used a good quote from Einstein that said when he was asked what he would do if they coming observations of the sun, I think it was, revealled that light didn’t bend to the effect of gravity, and he said God had better have made it that way, because the math worked. I don’t remember it correctly. I read the book over a decade ago or so, but that was the general idea.

The second primary goal of the book was to lay out an alternative cosmological theory against the Big Bang that was being developed, apparently, out of research done by some scientists in norther Europe who were working on plasma theory.

I don’t pretend to understand 1/10th of the math even remotely or comprehend the science at all. Hawkins wrote the dumbed down book for general consupmtion, and the author of this other book did too, but if what he writes about this other research holds any water at all, it is worth buying the book if you are curious about such things.

(He also goes into some ideas he has about how the nature of grand “cosmological” theories that tie the whole world into a neat equation were developed from the difference between geographically smaller and more trade oriented socities and larger states were slave owning was more common, but I don’t remember that part much.)

My point is that science is often influenced by certain leaps that are faiths.

It seems to me when you start to really hear about the cutting edges of science or the broader foundations of much of the creative activity that produces breakthroughs or at times that ties together loose ends in theories that guide but don’t exactly define applied science, you run into some forms of faith.

And as I said, you always have room for break throughs — even stunning break throughs — that make what was believed before as absolute gospel look like unbelieable nonsense to even the average man…….

People that are not Christians should be left alone, they do not need this help from crazy Koreans. And of course the missionaries have every right to go and become martyrs, but that doesn’t make it right or justifiable.

No. I believe I said the Muslim missionaries would annoy me as much as the Jehovah’s witnesses and other Christian missionaries do….

You made some great points about the Christianity in Western history.

But, do we believe we see clear signs in contemporary Korean Christianity that lead us to believe they are likely to repeat the mistakes made in the European Middle Ages? Do we deride Korean Christianist so much because we recognize it is on the path to a repetition of the Spanish Inquisition? Or that a future unified Korea will witness the Southern Christians converting the heathen Northerns at gun point or else? Or that a unified Christian Korea will feel it must wage war on the non-Christian Chinese?

And again, we don’t have to look to look so far back to get at this point.

When we look around at what annoys us about Korean Christianity, do we think Korean Christians are reaching a point to where they are going to go to Saudi Arabia and try to assassinate the royal family with a suicide car bomb? Do we think Korean Christians are going to blow themselves up in Korean Buddhist temples?

I just want us to think about it —- when we point back to the clearly horrible things done in the name of Christ in our Western social history, are we not placing on the backs of Korean Christian our own baggage?

Are we really pushed to the extremes we use in disgust of Korean Christians based on what they have done?

What besides being annoyed listening to them in public and thinking they aren’t tolerant enough do we have to justify the revulsion?

It seems to me what we keep offering up —- is a glimpse at our own cultural past —

and maybe that shoe would fit —- if you could convince me what you see in Korea today is clearly pointing to a repetition of that past.

Otherwise, is seems to me we end up with a great amount of distaste for public annoyance.

Also, what about their throwing their lives away for doing missionary work in a war ravage Muslim nation –

Let’s say we knew a group of Korean nurses who were going as a group on their own — not connected an effort by the Korean government — and not connected in the beginning to any Iraqi or Afghani hospitals — because they were so compelled to go for humanitarian reasons.

Would we think they were criminally insane?

I’d think they had a few screws loose.

But, would we feel the same level of disgust for them we do for the missionaries?

No.

What is behind the greater disgust?

Because the missionaries are dealing with religion and the nurses are dealing with the human body?

Why does that warrant great disgust?

Again, throw history out the window for a moment. We’re talking about the Koreans today and I don’t think a credible argument can be made that they are on the path back to the Middle Ages or even some elements of contemporary Islam.

I guess we can say, as you did in the last paragraph, that the missionaries are more detestable than nurses, because they put more than themselves at risk. They put the people they might convert.

Is that enough to warrant the amount of disgust we put on their shoulders?

What does justify it? Hating the Korean missionaries of today?

I’ll be a Marxist for a moment and say that most human wars are wars over who controls land/resources/labor–wars are economic. You take the biblical story of how God told the Israelites to wipe out the canaanites, because the cannaanites are evil, but if you look at the end result of that story, the Israelites are living on Canaan with Canaanite “stuff”. Actually sometimes just to make a point, the bible tells the Israelites to burn the vineyards and slaughter the livestock, but their livestock still graze on their land afterwards.

This is true whether we are talking about Maori tribes killing some smaller tribes or yes, even Buddhists killing non-buddhists or even worse, OTHER Buddhists. Shaolin monks weren’t doing Kung Fu because they thought it would be nice to engage in an activity which will earn them dividends in the far future. Pureland buddhists and Zen buddhists were butting heads too.

But what is this about religion? Sometimes there are wars that religions create and even drive. But you can’t say that the Crusades were purely religious. Religion was used as a driving force but a lot was at stake to be lost and won. Why did so many Africans become Muslims? Because a muslim could not make a fellow muslim a slave. This might be politically incorrect to say, but the decision to become a Muslim could be a purely an economic decision.

In our modern 20th century, people in power didn’t use religion to drive warfare but used nationalism/fascism/communism to drive war. And I would go so far as to venture that the these “non-religious” wars of the 20th century killed more humans than all the wars in human history combined prior to the 19th century. So should I say, “let’s get rid of all the -isms in human civilizatin!” That’s kind of silly.

What’s religion? I like to define that term by saying that it’s conviction based on an unsubstantiated/unprovable/untestable/unverifiable claim. I.E. Jesus is your personal savior is one. (until maybe tomorrow when God will cast you into the fiery chasm) But what about.. “All Aryans are One Glorious People? ” Isn’t that really a religious sentiment? Or, killing all the educated masses of Cambodia will lead to an Agrarian Paradise?(i guess this isn’t religious, since it was proved to be false) Voting Democrat/Republican will make US a better country. I think the statement, “Christianity has done the world more harm than good” is a religious statement using my definition, because counter factual speculation about a world without Christianity or a world without religion or a world without human abstract constructs in general, just is silly.

What I want to say is that if someone wants to prance around somewhere and speak in gibberish and insist that green is red and leprechauns live in our bellybuttons, who cares? Ahh! Some of you care because some of us believes that red is green and that leprechauns live in our nostrils.

If these green/red-bellybuttonists insist upon martyrdom, I must insist that that is their divine right, even if that makes people in the West look like wankers. You have every right to say that green/red-bellybuttonists are fools, but that’s probably because you are just a heathen red/green-nostrilist.