This is cursive letter sent from (by?) a French guy living in Xintien, apparently affiliated with the Jehovah’s Witnesses. We used to get their junk mail decades ago.
They are an exclusionary, cultish, esoteric, end-of-the-world believing, heterodoxical (or heretical) quasi-christian sect with mixed up ideas about life, liberty, religion, society & health.
Of course, they didn’t spell my name right either, which pisses me off. There is no ‘x’ in my name. We are not a cram school either. We’re a language center. We don’t cram anything into anyone’s brain ever. Not vocabulary, not language, and certainly not religion. To add insult to injury, they call me ‘Friend’. I guess they’re being ‘Friendly’.
I’m not sure why they’re sending me spam, though. The writing looks like a girl’s writing, perhaps a teenager. Someone who has been ‘persuaded’ to help by handwriting addresses and mailing them at the post office.
Why do sects like to proselytize? What do they think it brings them? Validation? Security in knowing they’re right? Spiritual upward mobility? LOL! Again, no idea!
But as much as I respect their liberty to believe whatever the f**k they want, I also expect them to respect my space, and stay the f**k away!
I had enough of that nonsense when I was growing up from the ‘Friends’ who saw my Mom’s vulnerabilities, who saw a ‘tool’ they could manipulate (for a while). And, of course, our Mom was never wrong. How could she be? So we followed her to:
- The Wee Free
- Salvation Army
- Baptist Church
- The Plymouth Brethren
- Jehovah’s Witnesses
- Mormon Church
… I can’t remember the other ‘ministers’ who stopped by over the years. But the roster eventually included most of the main brands of Christianity you’d expect in the UK: from the evangelicals to the orthodox Catholics and every shade in between. Well, except perhaps the Unitarians and the Scientologists. (Thank god for that!)
Credentialism run riot with some rather dubious sounding colleges and honorary ‘degrees’, where there is no meeting of minds whatsoever. Just consensualist groupthink.
I suspect though he was like many a young man, lost in his youth, and turned to Christianity as a way out. Of course, he got picked up by the Evangelicals and sought his validation through them by ‘converting’ others. I’m glad for him that he found a way: https://www.henryinstitute.org/henrys-story/ I would not stand in his way, unless he stood in mine.
But his values express not Christianity so much as his own worldview of the times he lived in and the proclivity of older people to be chicken littles. Life was never so good as before or in evangelical terms: we’re all heading to hell sooner than ever.
It’s just a pity that he was so wrapped up in his ‘intellectualism’ that he didn’t realize his worldview was warped by his male/white/upper middle class/conservative upbringing. and that the crisis of truth was merely his own ‘crisis’ at being forced to realize that the world has more stories & povs than the single story that he gave up his intellect to believe. Unfortunately, those narrow-minded values are eagerly taken up by wherever the churches spring up.
But of course, complexity doesn’t win souls nearly as effectively as evangelism. I wouldn’t disagree that people yearn for simpler times, simpler things… and hindsight really offers a simpler version of history that we can ‘believe’. That doesn’t make it right. No matter how you spin the Bible quotes. The use of Bible quotes along with the exhortation that the Bible is infallible word of God is just groupthink for ‘believe me because you need to believe me’.
Sorry, it’s a bit of a ramble but Evangelical crusades by the numerous ‘religions’ that infest Christianity each with its own version of the truth and equal certainty that they (and only they) are right really does my head in. I’d be quite happy to get a JW, LDS, WeFree, Scientologist, … etc. in a room together to see what would happen. It’d be like the Divine Hunger Games.