sophiaserpentia | (no subject)

Just posted this in

challenging_god and wanted to echo it here for posterity.

This is inspired by the conversation between

neven and myself as a response to my last post here.

I think I need to back up a little bit and describe where I am coming from.

"Compassion" is not a feeling. Compassion is an attitude and approach -- perhaps even an epistemology of sorts -- towards other people that regards every other person, and the entirety of their experience, as having the same importance as one's own being and experience.

As Anthony deMello wrote in Awareness, "[Y]ou must be what Christ was. An external imitation will get you nowhere. If you think that compassion implies softness, there's no way I can describe compassion to you, absolutely no way, because compassion can be very hard. Compassion can be very rude, compassion can jolt you, compassion can roll up its sleeves and operate on you. Compassion is all kinds of things. Compassion can be very soft, but there's no way of knowing that. It's only when you become love -- in other words, when you have dropped your illusions and attachments -- that you will 'know.'"

Compassion can thus be described as inherently rooted in mindfulness and respect.

And this is why I contend that "proselytizing" is not often a genuinely compassionate act.

Many Christians I correspond with attempt to make an impression on the people around them by learning to glow as upright individuals -- through constant demonstration of generosity, respect, and selflessness. Their whole lives are demonstrations of the Christian ideal. People are drawn to Christ by following the beacon of light that is their life. They are living what St. Francis of Assisi instructed: "Preach the gospel at all times; when necessary, use words."

Marketing and apologetics and coaching are not necessary, because they are learning how to become love, and by becoming love, their outward actions are a reflection of the spirit within them. Like Jesus said, "Every good tree bears good fruit, but a bad tree bears bad fruit. A good tree cannot bear bad fruit, and a bad tree cannot bear good fruit" (Matthew 7:17-18).

This is fundamentally different to the approach taken by many, who set out believing that they must identify those who have erroneous beliefs, and then work to correct those "erroneous beliefs," failing to recognize that one's beliefs are a reflection of one's being and experiences. Disregarding the being and experience of other people means one is not acting out of compassion.

And the fact that compassion is overlooked in this result is obvious in the strategy and tactics often devised by aggressive proselytizers. These are people who are coached on how to find logical flaws in other people's reasoning and on how to defend against common objections. I can always tell when I am debating with someone who depends on this coaching, because a difficult question will get a canned response, and when I press beyond the canned response, I get nothing but silence. The person I am conversing with is not speaking from his or her own experience; he or she is acting as a soldier, sent out with specific orders, specifically avoiding a discussion on a human level, because when you bring the soul into it, one's being and experiences, the answers aren't black and white.

Coaching on strategy and tactics does not take into account the various events in peoples' lives that have led them to believe as they do. It does not matter to an aggressive proselytizer, for example, that a gay man may reject Christianity because he was told to leave a church. It does not matter to an aggressive proselytizer, for example, that a woman was led to Wicca because the Wiccans she met valued femininity. Apologetics offers no answers for such people, just blind assertions.