According to Wikipedia, these shrubs are there for a reason. Denmark has found that blocking the line of sight significantly reduces the accident rate by forcing the drivers to slow down and consider only their immediate surroundings. Danish drivers hate them, anyway.
Agreed, it can be really hard to get around a roundabout as a pedestrian if it's not designed for it, and then they make it so both you and people entering don't know each other are there until you're about to get hit.
Don't get me started on our houses. For some reason we build the same houses in Queensland as we do in Melbourne: no eaves or awnings. I guess the idea is you just turn your AC up even higher in summer.
But that’s not a byproduct of trying to ‘use cheaper resources’, it’s borne of trying to create products that are shaped exclusively by how to best solve a problem and treat materials honestly, as opposed to ornamentation and material imitation.
That wasn't my point, or the point of GP. It's that modernism has become acceptable. So much so that everything from our buildings to our cars to our phones have the same style.
> It's morally indefensible in my opinion for a bunch of random people from many thousands of km away to go off to some pre-technology rural villagers' home territory and basically say "everything you believe is wrong, here's our god, you must follow and believe in him or you're going to hell".
But...why? If they are just saying that, why is that indefensible? The villagers' are free to reject that message (or a more accurate version of it), as are you or anyone else.
Because they never "just say that." Christians aren't raised to believe that "no" is a valid answer - that means eternal damnation after all. Everyone must accept Christ, that's the message, and Christians must do whatever it takes to get that message across. Food, medicine and other elements of "civilization" are always used as leverage, a means of influence and control, to pacify and eventually convert. Inevitably another "pagan" culture is erased, its heritage and language forgotten, its children indoctrinated (perhaps by force as happened with American and Canadian indigenous people) and its people made subservient to Western interests.
All that has been true, but it was not always true, and it is only half the truth.
You've used "never" and "always" as if Christianity, Christian missions, and the cultures they try to reach are a monolith and the same everywhere. You've also insisted that any aide must only be to strengthen the power of the missionaries, and has nothing at all to do with the character of the very message itself.
You've also underestimated the agency of indigenous cultures and their ability to appropriate Christianity, so much so that some Tiwi Islanders (islands to the south of PNG) insist that they converted the Catholic church when it embraced them (https://researchportalplus.anu.edu.au/en/publications/going-...)
> underestimated the agency of indigenous cultures l
yeah thinking "we shouldn't influence poor locals because obviously we can do it so easily" is a little condescending.
I know people from the west who reject religion but pretend just enough to get some benefit from the church, why assume locals are too dumb to do it.
there were historic cases where native people rejected a religion and paid price in blood. THAT is a problem. if there is no forcing, there is no problem.
The character of the message is that "every knee shall bow and every tongue confess that Jesus Christ is Lord."
Missionaries bring aid because they bring the Gospel. They wouldn't bring aid without bringing the Gospel. But like that idiot who tried to convert the Sentinelese, they would bring the Gospel without aid, if they felt so compelled. I don't think it's incorrect to say that everything else is a means to the common end. Christianity is an assimilationist religion. Jesuits may do it differently than Catholics who may do it differently than Baptists, but conversion is always the end goal.
>You've also underestimated the agency of indigenous cultures and their ability to appropriate Christianity, so much so that some Tiwi Islanders (islands to the south of PNG) insist that they converted the Catholic church when it embraced them.
I mean, they didn't, that isn't ever really how that works. Whatever Catholicism they appropriated will inevitably erase and obscure their culture and identity, as will the influence of Western culture. I couldn't read the article you posted unfortunately but I did find an article that basically seems to tell the story[0]. I also found an article written by someone of Tiwi descent that tells a less friendly, or at least more complicated story[1].
I'm more willing to believe the word of a native over a Christian missionary, all else being equal. It may not be fair but history demonstrates that the relationship between Christianity and indigenous peoples is one of exploitation, suffering and colonization more often than not.
The message is also "love your neighbour as yourself", and this "Lord" that people bow to is, according to the message, someone who died instead of taking that Lordship by force.
While it might be true that "Missionaries bring aid because they bring the Gospel" to some degree, it is also true that the Gospel brings aid. It is the message that generates the desire to help people.
Your accusations of "assimilation" are just too simplistic. Take, for example, bible translation. In Australia, Anglican missionaries did not put much effort into translating the bible into indigenous languages as the had essentially hooked their mission projects up to the assimilatory 'White Australia' policy of the government. BUT that was in stark contrast to their actions in the rest of the Pacific, where they put great effort into translating the bible into native languages.
> Whatever Catholicism they appropriated will inevitably erase and obscure their culture and identity
This again is just completely dismissing the agency of the converted people. Not to mention easily observed cultural particularities across the world. For example, I experienced a group of Solomon Islanders praying. In my Western culture, we would pray one at a time, but they all prayed out loud, all at the same time. Western values of a particular view of orderliness hadn't overridden their culture.
> I'm more willing to believe the word of a native over a Christian missionary, all else being equal.
Fair enough. I do not deny at all the paternalistic, violent, coercive and assimilationist past (and still present) actions of the church. It is shameful and inexcusable. But I don't for a minute admit that this is because the church was being faithful to it's mission and founder. It's because it wasn't being faithful to the message that it perpetrated these crimes.
But again, it is reductionist to say that this is the only experience. Australian Indigenous culture, Maori culture, traditional PNG cultures are still alive and well, and Christian members of these people groups still choose to be Christian. A simple appeal to "power imbalances", "assimilation", "indoctrination" etc. to explain why they remain so is to rob them of agency.
If you have a season ticket to a Premier League team you're going to be in that density once a week or once a fortnight. Whatever the percentage of time that might be, that seems frequent enough to not be an edge case.
reply