Weiye Loh's Library tagged Proselytizing → View Popular, Search in Google

Jul

2011

on the contemporary church: criticism, culture & crisis | the blink times

Are denominations at risk of extinction? Judging from the current trend, it seems quite obvious that apart from the monolithic traditions and a few eccentric separatists, the differences between various Christian groups aren’t really there anymore. All of them—in the name of an Evangelical banner, no less—believe in the inerrant nature of the Bible, the importance of proselytising and the need for personal salvation. There’s nothing wrong with these tenets, but several social transformations seem to suggest that the Church is making a desperate attempt to stay relevant and politically engaged.

www.joelgn.com/blog

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Religion Christianity Proselytizing Parsimony Grand Narrative Narratives

Walk out into the streets and you will find doomsday prophets, LGBT antagonists, anti-evolutionists and pseudo-liberals with a white-washed hippie version of Christ. Incidentally, all their voices are supported with visual appeal and sophisticated marketing strategies.
Complexities only lie with the form, while the message must be ‘simple’ enough to generate the critical mass of believers. These people seem to enjoy politicising their faith, even when they have not made much sense out of it. The modern Church has become a massive advertisment, but how much of the ‘real’ gospel is being advocated is anyone’s guess.
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- The bigger question is not really what the book says, but how we interpret, and more importantly relate it to our own experiences. To refrain from self-reflection and go on a hate-war against those who ‘appear’ to be living a life of sin would only make the faithful look foolish.
- A Christian may warn the atheist of total chaos and say, ‘If God does not exist, then everything is permitted.’ But how often have Christians used God’s name to further their own agendas of conquest, colonisation and capitalist coercion? It is thus hard for me to disagree whenever someone claims that God has become the justification for our selfish actions and lawlessness.

Oct

2010

Epiphenom: When in doubt, preach!

When in doubt, preach!
By Tom Rees on Friday, October 29, 2010

epiphenom.fieldofscience.com/...when-in-doubt-preach.html

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Religion Proselytizing Uncertainty

New research by David Gal and Derek Rucker, at the Kellog School of Management at Northwestern University, suggests that shaking a person's confidence actually can make them more likely to go out and preach.
They took 106 undergraduate Mac users, all of whom believed that Macs were superior to Windows-based PCs, and put half of them in a state of trepidation by asking them to write about a situation in which they felt uncertain. The other half wrote about a situation in which they felt certain.
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- compared with confident individuals, those in a doubtful frame of mind would be slightly less likely to try to persuade a close-minded person. But they would be much more likely to try to persuade an open-minded person.
- They did another experiment which showed that students would spend much longer composing a persuasive message to convert someone to their own dietary habits (carnivorous, vegetarian, vegan) if they were feeling doubtful. They got a similar result after asking students to write about their views on animal experiments.

When in Doubt, Shout! — Psychological Science

When in Doubt, Shout!
Paradoxical Influences of Doubt on Proselytizing

pss.sagepub.com/...0956797610385953.abstract

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Religion Science Proselytizing Uncertainty

disconfirmed religious beliefs increased individuals’ tendency to proselytize to others.
We examined a general form of the question first posed by Festinger, namely, how does shaken confidence influence advocacy? Across three experiments, people whose confidence in closely held beliefs was undermined engaged in more advocacy of their beliefs (as measured by both advocacy effort and intention to advocate) than did people whose confidence was not undermined. The effect was attenuated when individuals affirmed their beliefs, and was moderated by both importance of the belief and open-mindedness of a message recipient.