John Allen Chau: Do missionaries help or harm?

[RockRaven]

6. Harm.

Everything related to their attempts to convert people to Christianity is an unmitigated harm. Duping desperate (or merely curious but ignorant) people into believing a load of bunk is clearly a waste of their time and energy. Encouraging them to give money to those who already have more than they do is abominable. Training people not to think critically/rationally has a range of collateral damage associated with it.

There's no charity work which missionaries sometimes do as a way of insinuating themselves into a community which could not be done by a secular charity. So even when they do good things, it comes unnecessarily attached to a big streaming pile of nonsense.

And then we have disease, disruption of family and community structures, loss of languages and cultures, etc.