People who think that all they need to know, and all the rules for life, are contained in a some book are crazy. They've been given a brain by mistake, because they aren't using it to figure this stuff out for themselves.
"well i have a few point to make on this.
firstly, whoever said that the japanese are infidels, please do your homework before you accuse christian missionaries of using such words. it is islam that calls the nonislamics infidels. christians do not."
Hey kaelrysh, how 'bout you pick up a good history of Europe, and the Middle East, and flip through to a couple of juicy sections (instead of fundamentalist religious texts)
I recommend:
1) Christian conversion drives in Europe after the fall of the Roman Empire
2) The Crusades
3) The Catholic Inquistion
4) The Thirty Years War
Or any other time in which your religion has been used as an excuse to murder, exploit, cheat, lie, and oppress people. Many people seem to have very little understanding of history, but when you combine this with religious fervour, it's the worst mix.
Here's some words that leaders of Christianity have used, which are used in a derogatory fashion towards one group or another:
heathens
pagans
heretics
saracens
As for missionaries in Japan, I think they should all get the arse. There is so much arrogance involved in arriving at a place with the sole purpose of making them like you. These people don't understand the history or culture of Japan. They use misinformation and intimidating tactics to convert people, and they are
Mormons occasionally stand outside my university and hand out leaflets and try to convert people. How about I travel to Utah and get a team of well organised atheists to help people understand why what they believe is a load of crap and has a whole truckload of negative consequences for the individual as well as the society.
You can see that it doesn't work the other way, that these people would really dislike a foreigner just showing up and telling them why they're wrong.
These missionary bums should do an apprenticeship or study for a degree or whatever and become useful members of society, rather peddling their crap. Someone who can design better ploughs, or invent new strains of wheat, or write great poetry, people who actually DO stuff are what we should value, not people who are working in a field in which there is no measure of success and no tangible benefit. Jamming propaganda down someone's throat is really the pits.
One of the best things about Buddhism is the moderation that it promotes, the "Middle Way". Religion is fine, it's just when people value ghosty-spirity things as more important than the people they live with, that you have problems. Like, for example, forbidding a child to take part in Xmas celebrations. The mum values her religion over her kid. The kid probably doesn't understand why it's happening and would tend to rationalise it that it was her fault, or she was bad or something. That mum needs to wake up to herself.
In australia we call these people 'god-botherers' but i can tell you they bother a lot of other people too.
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