melb100 lives in edinburgh!
The music teacher just asked me to listen to a CD of gospel songs and write out the lyrics. I did so without qualm, but then he asked me to translate them and we ended up having a huge conversation about the Christian church in Japan and the missionaries who roam the streets here.
Turns out he (and all the other teachers who happened to be listening) finds them just as offensively patronising as any unapologetic atheist does.
“Japan has had its own religions for hundreds of years, so who on earth do they think they are to turn up and tell us all we’re going to hell just because their religion was invented thousands of miles away where we were unlikely to hear of it!”
“We go about living our lives, and they go about living theirs, and leading a good life should be all there is to it. I don’t understand how they could think that leading a good life in the name of their god is better than leading it by following the teachings of Buddha, or just from a general respect for the world and things in it.”
And, my personal favourite…
“If their god does exist, shouldn’t he be able to come up with a better way of revealing himself to us than sending these idiots on their bicyles to accost us as we try to do our shopping?”
