[Despanan]

In my experience Vind, the philosophy behind your mission trip is not uncommon.

I remember when I had a conversation about my fundraising work for Active Water with a christian friend of mine. I was telling him all about the charities work with building wells in Zambia, and the AIDS clinics they were setting up. His response was to say (very earnestly):

"But they use some of that money to build churches, right?"

In his eyes, converting people to Christianity was more important than helping them get a steady supply of clean drinking water. And this guy is more than a decent person.

The thing is, if you believe in the divinity of Jesus Christ, and follow the scripture of the bible, then you must believe that this world is temporary and suffering and death here is intrinsically less important than how someone will spend eternity. Therefore, the only logical conclusion one can draw when using a christian worldview as their operating principal is that making sure that someone makes it to heaven and/or avoids hell IS infinitely more important than helping them improve their own temporal lives/community.

This attitude isn't even necessarily bigoted or evil, depending upon the person. I would say that the Catholic charities threatening to with hold their services if Homosexual adoption is permitted, is monstrous. However, in a Catholic's mind, they may simply believe that it's better for a child to grow up without parents than risk Hell due to the temptation of a homosexual lifestyle.

Do all faith-based charities operate in this manner? probably not, but if they really believe in the normative christian view and the Bible's scripture, this conclusion is pretty much inevitable.

As long as: "I am the way, the truth, and the light; no one comes to the father, except through me" reigns supreme in a person's mind, helping the downtrodden will always be secondary to saving their souls, no matter how kind or compassionate a person they may happen to be.

Now considering the fact that in all likelyhood, Jesus was not divine, God does not exist, and all of this is just a collection of superstitions based on the writings of pre-historic desert nomads, you can see why it's so important to operate with the correct view on reality, and why Kontan and I rail so hard against superstition. Regardless of what kind of a person you are, it is genuinely dangerous, to yourself and others to have a fiction like this as your operating principal.

You can see why Kontan and I would have a problem with a statement like:

"As long as it inspires you to be a good person, what's the harm in believing in a God(s)?" and why we are passionate about this particular topic.