1 February 2010 Just what Haiti needs more missionaries.

1 February 2010 Just what Haiti needs more missionaries.




Levels of Tzedakah

Certain kinds of tzedakah are considered more meritorious than others. The Talmud describes these different levels of tzedakah, and Rambam organized them into a list. The levels of charity, from the least meritorious to the most meritorious, are:

1. Giving begrudgingly

2. Giving less that you should, but giving it cheerfully.

3. Giving after being asked

4. Giving before being asked

5. Giving when you do not know the recipient's identity, but the recipient knows your identity

6. Giving when you know the recipient's identity, but the recipient doesn't know your identity

7. Giving when neither party knows the other's identity

8. Enabling the recipient to become self-reliant

Nowhere in this list do I see any suggestion that it is charitable to send missionaries, intent upon converting people suffering from disaster to another religion.

John Travolta wasted jet fuel and landing pattern time/ramp space to fly in 80 scientology higher-ups to perform some sort of mystical voodoo known only to those able to afford and able to swallow the mythos of scientology. What benefit to the earthquake survivors there might be in having these people on the island remains to be seen.

An Idaho Baptist church sent members to Haiti to bring Haitian children back to the U.S. They were arrested by Haitian for “trafficking in children.” Some (10) of the “orphans” they intended to transport into the Dominican Republic without benefit of passports or other legal documents, were not orphans but had at least one known parent. The Haitian government views this as kidnapping and I tend to agree. Unspoken in any televised commentary about the arrest and incarceration of these church members is the certainty that any children they manage to take from Haiti to the U.S. will be told that their current religion is not valid and that they must accept a new religion. This is truly kidnapping of the worst sort.

We’ve seen this before. The Spaniards forced Roman Catholicism on much of the Western Hemisphere, converting the natives from their own faiths to that of the Roman Church. The French tried the same but with less success. The Congregationalists and LDS churches sent missionaries throughout the Pacific Basin, sweeping native cultures from island after island and leaving the natives dispossessed but converted. Cultures died where the Roman Catholic Church set foot.

The U.S. did the same thing to our Native Americans. After we established reservations we established schools where young men and women, removed from their families and reservations, were to be taught new skills for the future and a new faith for their souls. The schools failed miserably and the students lost their native cultures but were handed only bibles to take away the pain of their losses.

Our right wing, religious and political, never tires of telling how Islam plans to conquer the Western world. They are correct, Islam is a religion designed to spread aggressively and by aggression. But so is Christianity, The number of forced conversions that took place in Spain, Italy, France, and the rest of Western Europe is beyond easy calculation. It rivals the number of non-Christians slaughtered during the Crusades.

Our right wing seems to find no problem in constant proselyltization by Christians. If any other religion demanded freedom to behave in such a manner, there would be a call for its elimination from American life.

While we and other nation’s aid in the gradual reconstruction of Haiti we need to protect that nation from corruption and malfeasance. We need to protect it from price gouging, from receiving substandard building materials, contaminated food and water. And we need to protect it from missionaries who can’t wait to load up another bus-load of kids to convert.

Many of these church run children’s aid charities have names designed to tear at people’s emotions and desire to protect children. But they all want to remove the kids from their current culture in order to change their religion. They would do far more good “for the children” if they stayed home and sent money to feed and house all people who need help in Haiti. Haiti needs an embargo on missionaries. Write your Congressman today.