How to Proselytize?

I ended yesterday’s exploration of proselytizing by saying the following: if you find that your faith brings you happiness, and if you are not so much concerned about salvation versus damnation, then proselytism is for you your ongoing conversation with others about happiness.

In some ways this is not really proselytism at all; or rather, it is a fresh way of looking at proselytism, a suggestion that we are probably already doing this in the course of our normal lives, without any burden of obligation, but with joy and intellectual hunger. So the question of how to proselytize becomes far more broad: how to talk about happiness?

This seems like a ridiculous question to ask, but I think that the question has some things to say to us. First, it forces us to know ourselves as creatures of happiness or unhappiness.

Second, the question of how to have a conversation about happiness forces us to ask whether we know our fellow human beings intimately enough from our own sense of ourselves that we should be able to presume that our own procedures for happiness are requisite for the happiness of the other.

Third, any conversation about the happiness of the individual should necessitate further discussion about the happiness of all individuals, and whether the happiness of one can exist without the happiness of the many, or whether the happiness of one can exist without the happiness of all.

It is likely that these discussions will lead to discussions about belief, either immediately or after a period of some time; but we must also be open to the possibility that discussions about belief may not suggest insight about happiness for every person involved.