I'd have no problem with it if they said ``Here's some food, water, and a Bible,'' but that's not what I've seen them do.

I'd have a problem even with that, unless -- and I think this is the issue here -- the food and water are also available without Bible. Making humanitarian aid contingent on accepting evangelism is a crime against freedom of religion and a crime against humanity. Now again, I'm not saying that's what respectable partisan aid agencies such as Christian Aid do -- although it sounds like the same can't be said for Samaritan's Purse -- but even the appearance that this might be so, is so damaging to other cultures that it's IMO worth aiming for completely secular aid-giving in order to avoid it. (Even if the starving peasant in the war-destroyed village only thinks he must renounce his religion to get the food or medication which is the only alternative to death, he will probably do so.)

(And it's not a problem unique to the food-water-and-Bible stage of outreach. The "classical" missionary in the jungle, where the bribe is more like radios-penicillin-and-Bible, is just as guilty of deceitfully using a supremacy of material wealth and goods in order to purport a supremacy of spiritual insight. I do get angry when I think of all the indigenous cultures, the religious microclimates, which could have been documented and preserved by the West instead of being lost forever, slashed-and-burned in order to grow Christians. Such wanton, unthinking, systematic destruction of human nature! Such cultural genocide!)

I accept though that there are good arguments against banning religious aid agencies. One is that aid agencies need large stocks of moral and ethical human beings, and many organised religions are good places to find such human beings; it shouldn't thus be a surprise to find aid agencies extensively staffed by religious people. Another, less clear-cut, justification is that rich Western fundamentalist religions are simply not going to donate money to secular aid causes, whereas they will to religious ones -- it's possible that the good the extra money does offsets the harm done by their crimes against religious freedom. You'd need to be one heck of a hardliner to want your children unevangelised but dead, even if fed but evangelised were the only other option.

Basically, I agree that it's a very knotty problem, especially when played out against the backdrop of an animosity as old as the Crusades or as the fall of Byzantium.

Peter