Last night I was walking with my bf and a college-aged girl stopped us to ask if we’d be interested in participating in her study. It took literally five entire minutes of chitchat and evading questions before she revealed that it was not an academic study but a Biblestudy group.
That’s…certainly a new one from evangelists, at least as far as I’ve heard. But it’s also genius, at least for hooking intellectual types who may not respond to traditional evangelism.
I got that once! Her “study question” was what I would want to ask Jesus if I could talk to him. I had just left an effective altruism meetup so I took it really seriously and was like, “Hm, I guess I’d want to know if he could clarify his goals, and explain whether he thought that the message he delivered when he was on earth was an effective way of achieving them, and how/if he would change it now he’s seen what Christianity is.”
she looked very scared and said “you don’t want to know if you’re going to heaven?”
I didn’t have the heart to tell her that I already knew I was not.
“What would you ask jesus?”
“Who is jesus?”
My power move would be to ask Jesus if he wants to come to my bible study group; I know a lot of the commentators weren’t around when you died man, I think you’d be really interested in what Rambam has to say about…
The best fantasy worldbuilding always starts with really asinine questions. Not even basic stuff like “how do they get their food?”. I’m talking much more trivial: stuff like “are their swear words more likely to be obscene, scatological or blasphemous?“ or “what kind of hats do they wear?” - that’s your gold mine, especially once you add “and why?”.
In my campaign it’s rude to refer to reptilian races as lizards unless there actually lizardfolk mostly because calling dragonborn and kobalds lizard would essentially be like saying all reptiles look the same
