Call the Witness

[kerravonsen]

synaesthete7 has a very good post Orange Juice and Living Water
or the LJ RSS feed putting her finger on
exactly the difference between "being a witness" and the (usually Evangelical Christian) practice of "witnessing" (which is a particular jargon word which is more secularly translated as "bible-bashing").

Comments

[astrogirl2.livejournal.com]

That's an excellent post.

I was complaining recently on my blog about some particularly obnoxious and pointless "witnessing" I'd, er, witnessed, and somebody made the joke that, hey, perhaps they were Satanists trying to push people away from Jesus. Alas, never attribute to conspiracy what can be explained by stupidity and all that, but, honestly, it's always seemed to me people who employ those kind of hounding techniques couldn't do a better job of alienating people if they'd tried. It was certainly very, very effective in my case, not because I'm unhappy about being driven away from the religion or something (I'm not, and the break was mainly a philosophical one, not a social one), but because it left me with a deep-seated and rather ugly predjudice against Christians and their religion for a long time, one that I only got over in my late 20s by finding a Christian who was actually happy to talk to me about his beliefs without trying to bludgeon me with them or getting all supercilious.

And, um... if I talk about this subject any more, it's going to degenerate into a rant. More than it already has, I mean. So I'll stop there. :)

[ladyslvr.livejournal.com]

In the US, at least, what's described in this essay would be Bible-thumping. By any name, it's ridiculous.

I got so sick and tired of the Campus Crusade for Christ trying to convert me that it made me want to seek out equally obnoxious alternatives just to have something smart to say to them. (Don't worry, I didn't.) Of course, their method of "conversion" was to approach me on the street and tell me that I was evil. Repeatedly. And since I was evil, I needed to be Saved.

They never even bothered to find out first if I might, in fact, already be Saved. They did, however, do a wonderful job of instilling in me my one true prejudice: a hatred of Bible-thumping Evangelical Christians.

[vilakins.livejournal.com]

Loving other people is always a good start and it seems to me that love is what's almost entirely missing from those hard-hearted bible-bashers with their criticism and condemnation.