What is your view on this?

Question

i have to write a two page paper on this and i dont know where to start or what to say! will you help me please :) the question is "ethics and speech: do the ends justify the means in sharing your faith," which basically means as my teacher stated = can i use any mehti\od to encourage someone to come to the lord. THANKS

Answer 1

Well, as an atheist, I've gotten everything from invitations to church, bibles given to me, illogical arguments, threats of h**l, and even death threats for not believing.  Are any of those things likely to convince me that there's a god?  Nope.  Are they likely to convince me that the people who believe in a god follow the philosophy they claim to?  Nope.  With me, all they've accomplished by 'sharing their faith' is a general distrust in anyone who claims to be religious as if that's a reason to trust them.

Answer 2

Wow, that other answer from Ma...Maka.....Macarena, or whatever her name was, was completely pointless, and did nothing to address what you are asking.

"Do the ends justify the means?"  Your teacher was correct in explaining this the way he did, but it sounds like he is already biased towards and actively practices religion.  That being said...

What you need to think about is this: Basically, what is the lesser of two evils? (not that either are)  The two evils in this case:

Is it OK to shove your religion down someone's throat, if that is the only way you can spread the word?

OR

Should you be passive in spreading the word of your faith, knowing full well that by not selling it lessens the chance that someone will buy it.

In this context, it is completely acceptable (and in my opinion, correct) to speak of religion/faith as any other capitalistic idea, such as goods and services.  So, if you're proficient at this Web 2.0 craze (which, by posting on Yahoo! Answers, seems like you are), you can turn it around and look at it like this:

What do you like more:

When you do a search, do you prefer when your reults are returned, you receive 5 different pop-ups on your browser that are specifically targeted to what you were searching?

OR

When you do a search, do you prefer if the search page brings up the results of your query, and provide links (usually on the left or the right of the page) that are specifically targeted to what you were searching?

Obviously, the former being the aggressive approach, the latter being the passive.

I hope this helps - I would hate hitting "writers block" on papers I had to write, so I had to start being creative in how I thought about the topic.  In this case, removing "religion" from the topic makes it that much LESS personal, therefore you are able to write a more subjective paper on the topic at hand.