Oh good grief. A day later, I’m now, says YoungRocco2, who seems to think he knows me, a “hypocrite” (comment #56), and there’s a hundred comments in between that one and my response. Would be nice if I could thread this comment above, but whatever…
YoungRocc2 wrote:
Gordsellar: You’re a bit of hypocrite. In earlier posts you criticize Koreans for being too nationalistic–for being too concerned with Korean problems and not caring about other countries. Now, all of a sudden you change tacks and criticize these Korean missionaries for NOT focusing on problems at home, claiming that they should have been focused on easing domestic suffering.
Wow! Which earlier posts? Did you google all my old comments on the Marmot’s? Or are you talking about my own site? How long has it been since I wrote those comments? I’ve never even heard of you, and you seem to think you know who I am, and how I think, to boot!
It seems you perhaps don’t grasp the fine and important differences between
- patriotism (loving your country),
- nationalism (telling everyone loving your country because it’s THE BEST and throwing a tantrum at anyone who fails to disagree, plus of course holding special international grudges and hating whole countries or races because of what some people’s grandparents did, as well as resentfully hating and putting down any country that helped your country in a way that made it look as if it wasn’t the strongest and best country in the world, with occasional frothing at the mouth, obsession about obscure Olympic events, and highly profitable national frenzies about minor border disputes, plus of course hating America), and
- compassion (caring about other people, whether they are nearby or far away, and trying to help them in their situation as best you can given your own circumstances)
- rudeness (visiting someone else’s country in order to tell them their religion is wrong and then trying to cram your own down their throats, by, say, singing Christian songs in their places of worship.)
You continue:
But hypocrisy aside,
Ha. Ha ha. Might I add that ad hominem attacks by themselves, are also rude, but even worse, when they’re made based on comments made elsewhere, in completely different contexts, about different topics, which may or may not even have been read, and may or may not pertain to the conversation at hand, don’t really lend any merit to your own argument?
And might I add that a person sometimes changes his mind about things, about a place, about a culture, due to his experiences? As I haven’t commented here much in ages, I have to wonder what long-ago comment you’re holding me to, and I have to wonder if you have failed to grow and learn and change since that time. When someone changes his mind in a way we like, we admire his “development,” but when we disagree with whatever argument he’s now making, we pull out the handy word “hypocrite” and bash him with it. In any case, it’s a personal bash, based on your vague and probably ill-formed opinion of me as seen in some comments I made on a blog.
In other words, don’t flatter yourself: you don’t know me well enough to know whether I’m a hypocrite or not.
your arguments still lack merit; you assume too much. You assume that this group of nurses did not cooperate with doctors who were already stationed in Afghanistan. Keep in mind that over 900 missionaries have gone to Afghanistan from Korea and that the troops stationed in Korea are in the medical corps. It’s highly probabale that they worked with doctors who were already in Afghanistan.
You’re throwing a “highly probable” in there to support a guess; as such, it’s worth very little. Maybe if some evidence comes out that they weren’t there primarily for Christian purposes, that they were skilled nurses who were working with doctors in Afghanistan, I might be a touch more sympathetic. What I’ve been told (by my fiancé who is tracking the story with some interest at the moment) is that there was one nurse in the group, period. Some of the group, on a previous visit to Afghanistan, had cooperated with a group of medical volunteers from a hospital in Anyang, and on that occasion, one of the individuals who is now a hostage (and who has a cyworld page here, though it’s currently down — more outraged netizen traffic abuse blockage, apparently, but there’s a copy of one post here, and I’ll host some screencaps from the minihompi for curious readers who may not have seen them yet, here) claimed that they “also” participated in medical aid — meaning that medical work was NOT the primary purpose of the visit.
And anyway, there are tons of countries out there who need medical help. Plenty of them don’t have roving bands of terrorists who specifically want to catch themselves Koreans to use as bargaining chips against their own government or the Korean government. Why didn’t the “nurses” go to Mozambique? Or Congo? Hell, anywhere in Africa, and lots of places in rural India, are both short of medical care workers and are mostly non-Christian.
The fact is, it’s known that large numbers of Koreans have been for a long time attempting to gain access to Afghanistan. It’s known that they are wanting to go there mainly to proselytize. It’s hard to imagine any non-evangelical Christian who would go to Afghanistan illegally, against the advice of their own government and the local government, simply to work as a nurse, when so many other countries are in need of the same aid. It’s also hard for me to swallow the claim that they’re there primarily for medical aid work after having heard translations of some of the postings on the cyworld page cited above.
Besides which, and to return back to the focus of these individual’s trip as well as the earlier topic of “rudeness,” these people not only happily posed in front of signs warning them not to go there, but they also visited a mosque and, after asking a guard permission to sing, started singing Christian music there; they also visited the tomb of someone they were told was an important Islamic leader, so they decided to have a worship service to God there. I’m sorry, but how do you think they would react if a bunch of Muslim missionaries entered their church, complimented its beauty, and started kneeling on the floor and singing Muslim prayers there?
There are a number of other errors in your reasoning. I’ll bulletpoint them:
Why thank you, but your bulletpointed “corrections” to my erroneous reasoning are themselves somewhat specious. Would you like to know why I think so?
1. You mistakenly assume that the church in question was not helping to ease suffering in Korea at the same time that it sent missionaries to Afghanistan. Take a look at their church’s website and you’ll see that their church has been helping people in Korea for quite awhile
If you mean this site, I can’t; it’s down. It was probably spammed by Korean netizens DDOS spamming them with complaints about their stupidity for sending 18 of their people to Afghanistan to provide the Taliban with pawns.
I will repeat my question, though, and this time, seriously: has anyone seen any Protestant Christian organization in Korea that has established something on the scale of those established by Catholic social aid organizations here?