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- Newsgroups: talk.abortion
- Path: sparky!uunet!usc!sol.ctr.columbia.edu!zaphod.mps.ohio-state.edu!uwm.edu!linac!att!cbnewsk!cbnewsj!decay
- From: decay@cbnewsj.cb.att.com (dean.kaflowitz)
- Subject: Re: To the discussionaries!
- Organization: AT&T
- Distribution: na
- Date: Wed, 18 Nov 1992 14:49:17 GMT
- Message-ID: <1992Nov18.144917.7146@cbnewsj.cb.att.com>
- References: <1992Nov11.190043.8658@iscsvax.uni.edu> <1992Nov18.010639.8793@iscsvax.uni.edu>
- Lines: 44
-
- In article <1992Nov18.010639.8793@iscsvax.uni.edu>, clifton9220@iscsvax.uni.edu writes:
- > What about the freedom to be a christian? In acts Jesus told us to sread the
- > news to all the world. Being a christian means at least giving the others the
- > option to know the truth.
-
- You know, I've seen this cited as justification for witnessing
- at the uninterested all over the net. Every few weeks alt.atheism
- becomes the target of the proselytizers and they often cite this
- same justification for telling the atheists that they are going
- to hell, that Jesus loves them, and a bunch of other stuff.
- This is in spite of the fact that many of the atheists in that
- group have frequently explained that they were raised as
- Christians in various denominations, some of them in very
- fundamentalist or born-again environments. The point is,
- the original instruction to spread the word was from a leader
- to a small following that was confined to a narrow part of the
- world. Clifton, the word has been spread. This is the United
- States of America, get it? Any day of the week I can turn on
- the TV and see some preacher preaching Christianity. Any time
- I have an interest I can read soc.christian. Every town in
- the country has some sort of Christian temple. You are
- fantasizing if you think that Christianity needs spreading in any
- but a small handful of the remotest places on Earth. The
- news has been spread. What you do now is not offer an
- option, but rather browbeat. That is what the proselytizers to
- alt.atheism do. The atheists know quite a bit about your
- religion, so all the proselytizers are doing is repeating the
- same tired old arguments and witnessing, and the only way they
- an win a convert is maybe if somebody is browbeaten into buying
- into the preaching, because we've all heard it before. I'll
- tell you what. You find me one, just one single lone person on
- this newsgroup or any other who doesn't know something about
- Christianity and has no way of learning any more about it
- except through you or someone else posting about it to a
- newsgroup that has nothing at all to do with Christianity
- (like talk.abortion or rec.arts.movies) and I'll say that
- maybe, just maybe (because I don't concede the point entirely
- since there is a matter of the rudeness of subjecting thousands
- to your proselytizing so that you might get one person you don't
- even know exists to hear something he never heard before)
- you have a point.
-
- Dean Kaflowitz
-
-