Atheists... Your life is pointless

And the GIs, too. I was stationed in Korea more than 40 years ago. The farmers, although well-enough fed, were so desperately cash poor that they paid their taxes in kind--bales of rice. It's not as though GIs were richly compensated, but you could get a case of OB beer for 900 wan, and a bag of the red-hot Korean ramen was ten wan--which was fractionally less than three cents a bag. They practically gave reefer away, and we used to trade American cigarettes and beer for drugs. At that time, American cigarettes were less than two dollars a carton at the PX, and sold for ten dollars a carton on the black market where the Koreans bought them. Mama-San would give us about four dollars a carton, so we profited, and she and her middleman profited. Everybody was, more or less happy. It figures about the money and food. As i've said, the farm folks didn't starve at least, but the urban poor were truly in tragic circumstances. The civilian employees used to sell the garbage from our mess hall to people who lined up around the block.

To be fair, it is actually a speculation about a private motivation.
That was not the private motivation I was ever familiar with.
I don't have any Christian friends who I think have this motivation.
I even know a Jehoviah's witness (can't get much more evangelical than that) who doesn't feel that way.

Yeah, I've seen documentaries and heard a lot from locals about those days. There's even a very common and popular dish that came out of those days. It's called 'budae jjigae' (부대찌개): https://www.google.co.kr/search?q=%EB%B6%80%EB%8C%80%EC%B0%8C%EA%B0%9C&hl=ko&newwindow=1&safe=off&tbm=isch&tbo=u&source=univ&sa=X&ei=8sk1UcvyL5T1qwHV-oCoDQ&sqi=2&ved=0CD8Q7Ak&biw=1024&bih=616

They throw in the noodles you mention plus hot dog weiners, spam, etc. The sort of things they'd get from the GI's leftovers.

True, some amount of speculation is involved, but the ability to read micro-expressions is a highly evolved trait and can be honed with experience. I'm not saying that 100% of evangelists are secretly trying to work their way into heaven, but if I were a gambling man, I'd bet that way on any given day because I think the odds would be somewhat in my favor.

Must be a pretty well kept secret.
In my experience, Christians are not so great at keeping secrets.

I've never experienced anything like that at all. We don't tend to talk about religion over here, if someone brings it up unsolicited, they're usually told to **** off. Maybe you should try that. '**** off I'm not interested,' works with all manner of evangelicals.

Think about it. How would you know if someone successfully kept a secret from you?

Like I said, I skip the rude part and just go with "I'm not interested."

There is a pretty wide range of verses that say contradictory things. Some say 'faith alone' and others say that works are necessary. I doubt you'll find unanimity among all the evangelist denominations and sects.

http://www.openbible.info/topics/buy_your_way_into_heaven

I was stationed for about two months south of Taegu at an isolated base in the mountains. One day, i went with a couple of friends up higher in the mountains and we came to a village where most of the people had never seen Americans. I have curly hair and Foster was blond, and they made much of us. Otto was of Amerindian descent, so he had straight black hair, dark skin and black eyes. They didn't pay any attention to him--after all, he just looked normal to them. We went even farther up and came to a farm house which was even more isolated, where the children at first hid from us, and then came out and tried to wash the white off our faces.

But what was striking was what they knew, or thought they knew about us. At the farm house, the oldest child kept daying "Kadjiwa tone" (i'm sure i'm butchering the Korean, although i spoke it pretty well at the time). First, i pointed out that he was using insulting language, the form of address one uses for children or dogs, and not at all respectful. Then i told him i didn't have any money. He just laughed, and said that Mehgook (if that's how you say Americans) had all the money in the world, and stretched his arms out in a big circle. In the village, the children had been a little more sophisticated. When they got over their initial shock, the followed us around, saying in a sing-song, "Chewinggummoney, chewinggummoney."

Most of us had a woman in the ville, and they would prefer consumer goods to money. They were very brand conscious. They wanted Ponds face cream, Tide laundry detergent, Ivory soap, Marlboro or Kool cigarettes and Bud-u-weiser beer. It was taken for granted that you would bring food when you came into the ville. They would take the food, which you would never see again, and then feed you up on ramen noodles and kimchee, with maybe some chicken if you paid for it. Our houseboys would take our clothes to launder, and return old, worn garments which had been carefully patched. If you didn't like that, you had to do your own laundry, and make sure your house boy didn't have the key for your footlocker.

Slicky boys, as they were called, would steal anything that wasn't nailed down. If they could, they'd break into the x-ray deparment and steal the old films. They'd render them for the silver solution with which they had been printed, and then the now blank sheets of heavy plastic would be sold as panes for the windows. Civilian employees were never allowed to handle surgical equipment, nor allowed anywhere near medical stores. All the vehicles had padlocks on the hoods to prevent the theft of batteries and auto parts. ROK soldiers patrolled the motor pools at night, and at least one GI to keep an eye on them.

Korea is a beautiful country, and i greatly admired the people as cheerful, friendly and hard-working. I've always wished them the best--they deserve it.

Wow. Thanks for that, Setanta. I can picture it all so easily. It looks like the first kid may have been saying, "가져와 돈," which means 'bring money.' 미국 (mee-gook) is 'America' or 'American.' I'm not too far from Taegu right now, now that you mention it. Couple of hours, maybe.

You know, theft and the general crime rate is so, so low here. Nowadays people, shopkeepers, etc, leave things out unattended where someone could steal them if they wanted to. In Mexico, I couldn't walk 15 feet away from my bag in a bus station without somebody trying to wedge a hand in it. I'm guessing Korea was about like that back then. Poverty and hunger will do that, even to good people.

I don't think they were stealing from each other (after all, they didn't have much to steal)--they were just stealing from us. Remember, Mehgook have all the money in the world. I was always amused when one of the whores would get angry at a GI for, as she thought, lying and accuse him of using "kuji-mara," beggar's talk. It was assumed that beggars are always lying.

Ah, yeah. Now I get it. It was easy to justify stealing from the Americans, since they had so much anyway. I can imagine them looking at all the food scraps thrown, given and away by the GIs and thinking how they must have an endless supply.

Well, by their own standards, they weren't far wrong. I worked in hospitals mostly, and that meant somewhat better food than in an ordinary mess hall, but even the lowliest mess hall on the DMZ served far better food than most urban Koreans could count on. In the hospitals, we used to get eggs, as many as we wanted, cooked to order for breakfast every day. Eggs, butter, milk, cheese and a lot of other foods were flown in by the Air Force on a daily basis. The PX/BX system had every snack food and candy bar that you would find in an American store, as well as most of the consumer goods.

On occasions such as Thanksgiving or Christmas, although many GIs carped (usually the loud-mouthed Christians), we looked the other way as the food disappeared in the mess hall faster than we were eating it. We only had one rule about that--the civilian employees were not allowed to take that away and sell it. At the end of the meal, we would load up a jeep and take it to the nearest ville, and hand it out to Mama-Sans only. They may have been rapacious themselves, but i suspect that meant the kids would get a good meal.

You know, the anti-American sentiment over here is almost exclusively among young people. Not many among those old enough to remember the War. What you say goes a long way towards explaining that.

In 1970, we used to say that the Koreans hated Joe Ching (the North Koreans), Park Chung Hee, and the Americans, in that order. If you got away from the GI villes, the people were friendly and kind. They'd invite you for a meal, despite their own manifest poverty, and you would politely explain that you had just eaten. We fed 'em up whenever we could.

I'm sure the Japanese were a rung above the Americans! Did you know that Park Chung-hee's daughter just got inaugurated president?

Yeah, that freaked me out when i heard that. He wasn't winning any personality contests 40 years ago.

The attitude toward the Japanese was a rather tortured one. They hated them as a colonial power, but they also bragged about having Japanese friends, and were avid for Japanese goods. This was especially true in Pusan, where all the business girls kept a photo of their special Japanese friend, and would show of the (usually cheap) jewelry and fine clothes he had provided.

Strange how history turns things around. He was universally despised for a few decades, then people started feeling the long-term benefits of what he'd done with the economy, then a few people started saying out loud that maybe he wasn't all bad. His oppressive **** was all bad, of course, but damn. Look at what happened to the GDP and the standard of living in such a short time.

And Park Geun-hye had to publicly apologize for her father's deeds before the election. Otherwise, I doubt she'd have made it.

As for Japan (and the US), the Koreans may hate foreign governments and what they've done over here, but that doesn't often translate to malice towards individuals from those foreign countries. I gotta give them credit for being able to keep that straight.

They were just starting on the industrialization of South Korea when i was there. The interesting thing is that Park Chung Hee's biggest contribution was to root out the corruption which had characterized Syngman Rhee's government. Corruption is one of the biggest bars to successful economic expansion, and i don't think westerners realize it, because it is largely absent in the day-to-day lives of people in the west. I saw a show on the teevee once in which a businessman compared setting up his operation in California and setting it up in India. In California, he had all the necessary permits and licenses in one day. He had suppliers making deliveries and his public utility services hooked up the next day, and he was in full swing by the end of the first business week. In India, he spent weeks just identifying all the palms he'd have to grease to get the permits and licenses he'd need, and that was before attempting to make contracts with private suppliers. He said he nearly abandoned his Indian market, but with such a big potential market, he felt he couldn't ignore it.