Why Do People Protest At Anime Conventions?
As much as costumes and badges, street preachers are a office of Comic-Con. Some simply hand out tracts or display scripture, while others deliver sermons or pepper their signs with topical references. "Don't exist Comic Conned!" reads one. "Your life is not fiction."
The preachers have been there for years, promoting organized religion adjacent to company booths passing out party invitations or hawkers carrying cans of Coke. But when I get-go saw them, I didn't realize that I was about to witness i of the ugliest facets of Comic-Con: the subset of vicious provocateurs who prepare out to "win" people over by telling them they're going to burn in Hell... and become the verbal reaction they were really looking for.
"They wouldn't keep doing it if it didn't piece of work."
Though the sign-bearers deny information technology, there's a common perception that they're protesting Comic-Con, and they periodically draw counter-protesters carrying signs similar "R'hllor saves!" and "Bring back that show I like." Other fans attempt to debate the science of evolution or the ethics of homosexuality. Merely a few wonder if, despite the general indifference and anger, they might be getting results. "How many people do you call back talk to them?" I heard while sitting in line one day. "They wouldn't keep doing it if it didn't piece of work."
My first, cursory contact was promising. A clean-cut teenager holding 1 of several xanthous signs dotting the sidewalk said he'd had plenty of negative reactions, only at least a few people took the tracts he was handing out, and he remained stoic about the rejections. Few people, nevertheless, seemed to pay much attention to him. The real success was a pair of middle-aged men standing in the roped-off intersection betwixt the convention center and the neighborhood beside it. Breaking from the more usual Biblical exhortations, their signs condemned drunkards, abortionists, atheists, "revelers," and "general heathens," and their inflammatory, megaphone-amplified speeches made them a lightning rod.
This wasn't Westboro Baptist Church: the message was at least ostensibly meant to convert people. And 1 of the men, alpine and white-haired, was friendly and more than willing to talk to me. "You don't meet a lot of sin hither," said the human being, who I'll call "Mike" for now. "If it were something like Mardi Gras you'd see a lot more than sin, a lot more drinking." His calling wasn't precisely a mutual i, but Mike seemed, at commencement glance, a fairly ordinary homo.
Presently, he was telling a young adult female to 'get back in the kitchen'
"Some people ignore usa, some people yell at u.s. and flip us off," he continued. "Some people throw things at usa. But this is what the Bible tells united states to do." I felt real sympathy for him — it takes bravery to share something personal with an unsympathetic audience. As we kept talking, though, his co-preacher (I'll call him "Ronald") began an aroused, steadily escalating fight with skeptical fans. At first, I was able to melody him out; before long, he was screaming at a nighttime-haired teenager most "castrated" Christians and the origin of the universe. Fans, meanwhile, were shaking their heads or jumping in to support anyone trying to convince the preachers that their message wasn't doing its chore. When I asked, neither human could recount a single positive interaction with a listener, and both tended more towards insults than anything else. A few minutes after I spoke to him, Mike was telling a young woman to "get back in the kitchen," prompting fury in her male friend.
His evolutionary arguments running out, Ronald told the teen that he was possessed by a demon. Another con-goer jumped upward, gave a quick "A demon? I've got this!" and started to perform a mock exorcism. The recipient pretended to stagger back and then lifted his hand for a loftier v, and the oversupply laughed. It released a steadily mounting tension, but it also turned the scene into even more of a sideshow. An evangelist standing on the reverse corner seemed mildly embarrassed for the men backside him. "If people detest what I practise, I want them to hate the message, not who I am," he said. But similar the others, he seemed to have little idea what would convert people, going by negative reactions to approximate whether he was doing the right thing. "If y'all wait at the give-and-take of God, the discussion of God didn't attract people," he said. "It repelled people!"
Though the organisation seemed futile to me at times, I remember the evangelists knew what they were doing. Ronald described his actions as a "alarm," and these tactics were the same ones somebody would use to derail a conversation anywhere else, cartoon people in with a "controversial" argument and keeping them in that location with personal attacks that were past turns unintentionally funny and infuriating. The strategy, in fact, wasn't all that different from your common internet troll, and at times it was hard to believe the men were for real — at one point, Mike tried to illustrate his transformation past very casually albeit to rape.
As far as I could tell, though, they were entirely sincere, and what they were doing was fairly rational. Emotionally speaking, they were getting a adventure to prove to themselves that they were a persecuted minority, hated for their opinions. Practically speaking, they were getting a lot more attention for their crusade than anybody else. These men weren't trolls. They were the upshot of a tradition that's divers "evangelism" every bit the equivalent of an internet pop-up advertisement: as long every bit somebody sees information technology, yous've done your task.
An hr or two later, I met a small-scale woman passing out tracts far from the intersections most preachers occupied. Her self-appointed mission, as far as I could tell, was to undo the harm caused down the street. "We're non like those Christians who preach hate to everyone," she assured me. Then she managed to do something I had non seen all 24-hour interval: explain why I should love the thing she was willing to stand in the San Diego sun for hours to share.
Whether or not I agreed with the tenets of her faith, information technology made me angry to run into the possibility of existent interaction drowned out by self-righteous ranting. At Comic-Con, more often than not one of the friendliest geek love-fests around, the most visible face of Christianity will probably always be the ugliest. Do they get results? Non in the mode you lot'd remember, but in a manner that makes sense to anyone who'south read a annotate section. Even if they're not trolls, nosotros just can't aid simply feed them.
Source: https://www.theverge.com/2013/7/26/4557256/for-comic-con-street-preachers-hate-gets-results
Posted by: bruntonthersellse1961.blogspot.com
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