Point and Shoot, Florida (YU)--Anthropologists call Christian missionaries, who go to exotic climes to convert the heathens to Christianity, plaguesters, because they bring Western diseases with them, which the natives have no immunity to, and die of.

Heap read a book called You Owe Yourself a Drunk: An Ethnography of Urban Nomads, by James P. Spradley. Spradley talked about how homeless men, many of them alcoholics, were treated by the police, the courts, by social workers, and by the missions set up to help them by giving them a meal and a place to sleep in return for their being sober and singing hymns. Feigning belief. Swallowing their pride and biting the bullet.

Rescue missions, the Salvation Army, religious evangelists, and street ministries helped some alcoholics get sober.

But they turned many alcoholics off. Their preaching, their reliance on the intercession of God, their baggage of guilt and prescriptive behavior, their overlooking of hypocrisy and double standards, their false morality were anathema, to some men (and women). They drove these people away.

These people--and Heap was one of them--couldn't take God being shoved down their throat, by sanctimonious people who used guilt like a club.

Think of Newt Gingrich urging a return to orphanages like Boys Town, or George Bush giving social services money to faith-based organizations, or sex education money to organizations that preach abstinence-only.

Just say no to a hard-on.

For one thing, these programs don't work.

And to starve more enlightened programs of money, in order to promulgate an ideological agenda, is callous, or cavalier, depending on whether you believe in what you are doing or are just doing it for political reasons, to hell with the affect your decisions have on people's lives.

Heap had been a grant writer for a community behavioral health care center, and had seen firsthand the effect such retrograde thinking had on people's lives.

The missionaries didn't care if the natives got sick and died. It was their souls they were worried about.

Let them die. They would join Jesus sooner.

Provided, of course, they had done as they were told.

By the plaguesters.

Militant, right-wing, certain. No trace of doubt. No questions.

Into the breach, once more into the breach.

You don't want these people in charge of anything. They're delusional. And mean. Vindictive.

If you're a secular humanist, or even a logical positivist, be careful.

Be very careful.