Religious Dishonesty
Offline They say religion makes people more honest. I do not see this to be the case. I recently remember 2 incidents of Christians bringing religion to a (pretty much) captive audience who had no idea they were going to get a religious message. Both were when I was in college (Kutztown University.) One which I experienced personally they put an ad up you could get a free (temporary) tattoo - turned out to be very temporary - magic marker. Anyway I got one, and about halfway in the guy starts talking about god. I wasn't quite an atheist at the time - I wasn't sure, and considered myself agnostic. I was pretty uncomfortable - I'm really shy and in person I'm WAAAYYYYY less confrontational than I am online - I also didn't know many of the replies to their shit back then, so I didn't argue. The other one I wasn't there - they were going to have a magician. I read about how it went in the school paper. It was a bunch of decent magic tricks. I don't quite remember how they put it, but somehow this tricks showed that the Bible was true. I remember thinking "What the fuck??????" Then there was the group that went and debated my (atheist) astronomy professor - he destroyed them in the debate by the way, but they pulled things like having a guy dressed as a monkey handing out flyers (anti-evolution nonsense.) Of course seeing this dishonesty did send me further in the direction against religion, so hey. I'd have certainly had some things to say nowadays. Sorry for the long post, but I just wanted to bring this up.
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I can think of alot of diffrent situations of religious dishonesty (a good many of them happened on this forum) but I do have a story from a long time ago which is pretty close to what you described.
When I was in high school, I hung out with a group of metalheads and punks. We hung out at this coffee shop across the street from the school, and we were pretty well known. Most of us were openly atheist, though a few were agnostic and a small amount were wiccan. At our school, there was a prayer group who basically saw us as being "lost" and all that dogmatic bullshit we've all heard a million times. They were constantly trying to witness to us, but previously they were doing it on a more individual basis. I had a few conversations with two of them who were in my english class. They ended with them telling me they were going to pray for me and me telling them I'd pray they found a deep well to throw themslves down. I few of my friends had similiar experiences.
One day, there were flyers passed around school letting us all know that there was free coffee being offered in the lounge the next day. There was no other information on the flyers; all they said was "free coffee! 2:00 pm tommorow in the student lounge." A few of my friends and I went there the next day and discovered that the whole thing was organized by the prayer group. As soon as we had a hot cup of coffee in our hands, they immediatly started yammering on about jesus to us. A few of my more polite friends humoured them. I promptly told them where they could stick their coffee.
We realized afterwards that it was probably a ploy by them specifically to witness to our group. Their master plan was pretty easy to decipher: rocker kids hang out at a coffee shop ----- therefore, they like coffee ------ therefore, we can lure them with coffee! The total number of us converted: 0. Well, maybe not a "master" plan.
Jesus died for somebody's sins, but not mine
Ha, those were the days. The prayer group was called Pete's Place if I remember correctly. Hey, look what I found!
They really wanted to "save us". Like, really bad. I always thought it was funny that they never went after the preppy nicely dressed kids at the front of the school even though everyone knew they all sold heroin and had promiscuous sex. It's all how you dress, I guess.
That makes me chuckle because that's the same method Amway uses to pull in new recruits.
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Guess that's just the way cults are.