agreed. fuck that guy.
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Throw in a couple miracles and we’ve got another St Sebastian on our hands…
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Damnit you beat me to it!
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…and my husband gave me shit for giving the LDS door knockers a shake of my head before closing the door. It could have been so much worse …
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Putting people at grave risk of fatal disease to preach the Gospels is certainly bad under Catholic doctrine, although I’m sure this guy was an evangelical Protestant. What a turkey.
That said, here’s the best song of a person getting killed by a native tribe, and perhaps eaten.
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We should find an island like this for Cliven Bundy and his crew.
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I’m with you on all the rest of it, but I wonder if you can explain this? Why is it tragic and where is the evidence that his intentions were of the best?
He actually returned after being chased off. He wasn’t welcome and was forcing himself on a population that had made their dislike clear. Even if I weren’t already incensed by the missionarying, that to me makes his death a matter of justified self-defense in the face of persistent persecution.
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Related-
We had a beloved, charismatic high school band teacher quit his job and follow his passion, taking his wife and young kids to Africa(somewhere) to teach music. Within a month, he was in the hospital, hit by a motorcycle.
He recovered, got back and sson was hit by a bus and died. Slow learner.
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Maybe the Prime Directive trumps the Indian penal code?
PS autocorrect on Android wants to turn “trumps” into “Trump’s” lol
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For one i don’t feel like cheering on someone’s killing even if i think what they were doing was immensely stupid. And i don’t think this guy was going out there to do harm to these people, what he wanted to accomplish would definitely cause a lot of problems for the tribe but i don’t think he was going out there crafting a mad plot to erase the natives.
But as i say in the rest of my post, even if he had good religious intentions ultimately whatever came of his visit would end up in disaster one way or another. And being a-religious i would prefer the natives to keep their customs over adopting a foreign set of beliefs.
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Also it’s entirely possible this dude was delusional and had a real death wish [/shrug]
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I don’t know about cheering on his death, but on the spectrum of possible outcomes, I’d put this as second best, slightly behind “the man realizes maybe this isn’t a good idea & goes home”, but it’s still quite a lot better than many other exceedingly likely outcomes so (shrug)
Even if he thinks he was doing something good, I think he was working towards a bad outcome, and I’m glad he was stopped
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If only all missionaries could be given the same fate, the world would be a better place.
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Hmm. Except they were dragging his body around. It’s not like they were handling him with rubber gloves while wearing filtered masks. Whatever bugs he may have been carrying, they were exposed to.
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He went to convert them, they helped him find Jesus
There, I fixed your headline
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There would be absolutely no point to missionary work if you didn’t come from a position of assumed cultural superiority(if your brand of salvation goods isn’t better than the local one then there’s not much of an argument for going to trying to convert them).
What is vastly less flattering is how often the belief that the fact that you were born lucky with respect to easy cultural transmission of the relevant revelations and the other guy wasn’t also implies your cultural superiority across a wide range of areas from architecture to linguistic complexity to choice of animal parts suitable for eating to not sacrificing babies to demons in cartoonishly evil rituals tends to crop up…
You aren’t really much of a missionary if you have a “no, it’s cool, you do you” position on the relative merits of your religion and theirs; but that neither implies that you possess nor requires that you assume superiority in any areas of cultural practice not directly dictated by religious instructions. Indeed a more literal than usual “there but for the grace of God go I” case could generally be made.
Beyond mere good taste there’s also the issue that tying your missionary activity to theories of general cultural superiority has a lot of the same pitfalls as tying your religion to a state’s interests: there are some juicy perks to be had from the culture whose ubiquity you’ll be advancing; but they won’t come without strings.
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