Anyone who is on this list serve has asked to be on it, has signed up for, and if you read what goes on, you understand that this is a serious academic electronic seminar. Mr. Ingle may feel you should evangelize any time, any place, but your evangelizing is an imposition and an insult -- a hostile assult -- on those people of faith who are content and happy with their own faith; this is a list serve to discuss scholarship and ideas, not to evangelize. If you use it for that, then you are misusing thie list and in effect commiting a fraud on the list serve. When we joined this list we joined for a purpose and clearly evangelical activities are not part of that purpose. When you attempt to convert me, or urge me to follow your faith, then you insult my faith and insult me. It is an assault on my beliefs and my way of life.
Mr. Ingle asserts it would never be offensive to evangelize, that it is always appropriate. I wonder how Mr. Ingle would carry that. Would he think it appropirate to enter a church or synagogue or temple during a funeral an begin to preach his/her evangelical beliefs? Should you disrupt a wedding with your religious views on conversion? Can you stand up in my classroom to witness your faith? Or the public library? Or a seminar on church and state? Surely this listserve is a seminar on religion and law and I would hope Mr. Ingle and others would have the sense of decorcum not to disrupt our seminar with their preaching.
Now imagine the shoe is on the other foot. Imagine you are in your church, and someone of a different sect of Christianity invades that space to disrupt your worship -- or your class if you teach -- asserting that *you* have the wrong approach to God. Or imagine someone of a non-Christian faith doing this.
Mr. Ingle may believe I am lost, but I assure I am not lost; I am quite certain where I am and do not need, or want, your advice on how to find my way.
Indeed, I think you have lost your sense of understanding towards others. I would urge you to consider if you would want others, Moslems, Hindus, Sikhs, Satanists, other Christians, to do unto you, as you so arrogantly claim you have the right to do to me; would you so happily want your intellectual seminar invaded by those who attempt to impose their faiths on you. If you want to evangelize, go into the public square and do it, but not on a private seminar of people engaged in serious discussions of about law and religion.
-- Paul Finkelman Chapman Distinguished Professor of Law University of Tulsa College of Law 3120 East 4th Place Tulsa, OK 74104-3189
918-631-3706 (office) 918-631-2194 (fax) [EMAIL PROTECTED]
[EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:
So be it, but it is important, I believe to be reminded of the ONLY reason we Christians ought to be followers of Jesus the Christ, and that reason is to evangelize the lost. I do not find that declaration offensive in this venue or any other.
LI
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