Many Christian atrocities are well documented, but I was never the victim as I grew up in Alabama. However, I have been agnostic most of my adult life while my siblings kept the faith. My sister, Sarah, and husband Ken were missionaries and then founded SIFAT (Servants in Faith and Technology www.Sifat.org) as an expansion of their work. Their son, Tom, is its current director. Below I include her yesterday’s letter giving a link to an hour-long report of her life and work. And if any of you take the time to see it, I want to ask you: Even if atheism is true, is the acceptance of this brand of Christianity bad?
....
Dear Family, Billy Stimson was a little boy in grammar school when I taught school on the Isle of Pines, Cuba before I married. His parents were U.S. citizens and were divorced and his mother brought him and his brother and sister to the Isle of Pines to live. I stayed with them a week before I married when his mother needed to go back to the states. He was a spiritually sensitive child and asked me many questions about what it meant to be a Christian. One day he asked me to pray with him so he could become a Christian. I think he was only in the third grade. Maybe fourth. I have not seen him since 1959 when we left Cuba, but from time to time he would write us. He graduated with a doctorate from Columbia University and married a lady from Taiwan and both of them teach in the University of Taiwan now. During the last year he kept asking me to take a video of my testimony. There were too many technical problems. I tried but couldn't get his zoom to work on my computer. But he kept on asking to do it. Finally Tom helped me do it at SIFAT. Billy has put it on You Tube. It is about an hour and four minutes, so you all likely will not have time to hear it all. But I will send it for anyone who does want to hear at least a little of it.
[Snip}
Love to all,
Sally Crump [=Sarah Crumpton Murphree Corson]
---------- Forwarded message ---------
From: Bill Stimson <bstimson@gmail.com>
Date: Sat, Mar 19, 2022 at 7:49 AM
Subject: The video
To: Sarah Corson <corsonsm@gmail.com>
Here it is:
Anyone can use just about any philosophical discipline to justify committing atrocities. Most if not all also have promptings and advice of peace and getting along with others. Perhaps rather than attribute the virtue or evil of people's actions to a source which can be used to encourage either, we need to attribute it to the individuals who commit the action - virtue or evil - regardless of their belief systems. (Please forgive the simplistic false dychotomy in this explanation).
Yes, that makes sense to me. Indeed, I suspect that--by and large--kind and caring atheists would have been kind and caring Christians, and that callous and mean atheists would have been callous and mean Christian, too; and vice versa.