Wow. He gets around. Phillip Blair is the bozo who was preaching on a Sydney subway, but there’s more! Here’s a video of Mr Blair railing at passers-by on the street — everyone is avoiding him. He has a limited repertoire, simply assuring everybody that he loves them at the top of his lungs, telling them about his past as a businessman and marine, yelling at them that they can be saved by Jesus Christ…but this is not a religion, oh no, it’s a personal relationship with god. The low point comes when he chastises a man in a wheelchair, telling him that Jesus could help him, but he’s too bitter to ask.
The funny thing is that it is Blair who is posting these embarrassing videos to his own YouTube channel, where we also learn that he hates evolution.
Does anyone think these obnoxious tactics work?
Thanks Doc for bringing this dhead to our attention ,just had a look at the comments left on his youtube channel .
Most are left by morons like him ,a few telling him to sod off out of Australia .
I don’t think such tactics are designed to convert people so much as to simply enable the evangelical goober to do something that leaves them feeling justified about being smug and condescending toward everyone else.
“Does anyone think these obnoxious tactics work?”
Yes – as anti fundagelicalism.
We have people on my university campus that act this way (antagonistic proselytizing) and it turns out that it’s a scam. They hope to enrage someone so that they get assaulted and then they sue the university (or person I suppose) and collect their settlement. This is now my default explanation for every angry public religious accuser – they probably don’t even believe what they’re saying, they are grifting.
@epistasis:
Well, that was explicitly part of the mode of operation of the Westboro Baptist Church… its founder had been a lawyer.
As for whether or not they work, microraptor has a point, but there’s also the other side of things… people are told to perform this sort of witnessing, and when it (obviously) fails, it usually just drives them back to the ‘see, the world outside the church is wicked’ arms of the elders of the Church. It was never supposed to ‘work’ in converting people… it was supposed to ‘work’ in creating a group of people who couldn’t talk to anybody outside of their Church anymore. Look at is as cult tactics and it makes a lot more sense.
@microraptor (#2) Yes, possibly with a bit of righteous fury. People ignoring and hating him just proves how right and good he is.
Yeah, because the dude in the wheelchair has never, ever heard of Jesus, I’m sure…
If you can’t tell, as much as I hate shouty evangelists, I hate those who target the disabled even more.
Depends on your definition of ‘work’, which in turns depends on his goal. I think it’s safe to say he’s not looking to save souls. But if he’s able to fundraise off of his efforts, they might be working exactly as intended.
Or, as microraptor suggests, it gives him the good feelz. Maybe this is some weird fundie version of ASMR.
WRT the question of why anyone would think antagonist proselytizing works, I think it’s a combination of lack of EQ and the idea that they’re martyring themselves in the name of Xianity. Fundies have this whole “we must martyr ourselves for Christ” complex as if they’re trying to earn brownie points from doG for the effort they put into in-your-face “witnessing”. Apparently to some, the more off-putting, the better.
Evangelists like this know how annoying they are, but that’s overpowered by their desperation to display their commitment and earn points. Thankfully that desperation can be overpowered by people telling him to fuck off.
But mate, seriously, this is a former British colony where most everyone speaks your language. You won’t find anyone here who’s unaware of your Jesus. Ken and Ray left this hemisphere and sought the largest concentration of gullible evangelicals in the world, with the greatest desperation to be sold things they’ve already bought. You should take a leaf from their book.
There was a group of people outside a train station near a school I taught at in Tokyo a few years ago who were offering to pray together with people. They weren’t noisy but were irritating. One of them spoke to me in good English, saying he had lived abroad for a few years and would I let him pray for me? I said sure–if he paid me ¥1,000 ($10). He looked shocked, but I explained that he wanted to do this for his own pleasure so he should pay for it. He said that it was for me but I said I could do my own praying if I wanted to. I went off to teach and at the end of the class one student came up to me to say that he had seen me talk to the guy and gotten a good laugh out of it.
“Does anyone think these obnoxious tactics work?”
People who are both sufficiently credulous and willfully ignorant enough to think that prayers and other forms of magic actually “work” are using a vastly different definition for that word than any informed rational person would be using. This is why religionists are always redefining “religion” as being “scientific”, “science” and “evolution” as actually being “religions”, their irrational “beliefs” as being “factual”, pious “lies” as being “absolute truth”, etc. The various bibles are composed of quite primitive fables spinning out piously distorted counterfactual versions of history that true believers desperately want to be “true” so they continually insist that they are “factual” despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary.
Phillip Blair is an obnoxiously ignorant fool because he has convinced himself that his life has no meaning any other way. The only way that can change is if he gains enough education to recognize himself, but self-sealing belief systems always block any potential learning path from occurring. He is far more likely to die just as obnoxiously ignorant as he is right now.
We don’t get many of these in England. There was one in Oxford when I was at university though, who usually took up his act in the middle of Cornmarket Street. I passed him on Wednesday mornings on my way to Christchurch for seminars on Medieval philosophy. I made a point of buying an easily thrown drink as I turned of Broad Street into Cornmarket, just in case I should be harangued by this delightful individual. Three weeks of the Pepsi Overcoat treatment and he started running away every time he saw me. It was priceless.
I tried the same thing with the annoying git with the megaphone on Oxford Street in London once. He was not happy, but I got a round of applause from the passers by. I can heartily recommend giving these people a sugary drenching. Shuts them up right away.
I imagine Blair does this shit for the same reason that John Allen Chau went to the Sentinel Islands. They’re bringing the healing word to the savages, and Jebus loves it when missionaries do that. Much like Mr. Chau, Blair failed because he didn’t understand the culture he was proselytizing to. At least Mr. Blair didn’t die for his arrogance.
Also if I was on the train I would have sung ‘The Loophole’ by Oates and Garfunkel. There’s nothing like the rousing chorus of ‘Fuck me in the arse cause I love Jesus’ to really put the wind up the god bothers.
Any chance of funding this preacher man to do his act in Saudi Arabia?
@gijoel #14:
Yet.