Think of it like wolves - most wolves stay in a pack with an alpha leading them. A few "lone wolves" behave differently, following their own direction. In the wild both behaviours are selected for naturally even within the same species in many cases, as given certain types of environmental stress one or other strategy might fail, so the continuation of the species is best served by two different paths being followed by various individuals.

Leum,"most Christian missionaries do not share john's rather idiosyncratic beliefs."
No they don't, but they are Christians nonetheless.

Modus,
keep looking you will always find what you are looking for.

Oh well, since there aren't many responses, I'll paste a link to a testimonial by an atheist.

Who apparently isn't a very bright one, as evidenced by comments like

Removing Christian evangelism from the African equation may leave the continent at the mercy of a malign fusion of Nike, the witch doctor, the mobile phone and the machete.

As if Christian evangelism were opposed to any of those.

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/comment/columnists/matthew_parris/article5400568.ece

In the first instance, it is usually our need to be right about something, our need to feel in control. If we think idea x, then we want x to be right. We may have arrived at x via more or less defensible avenues, bur once we are there we will defend x against attack because we need to be right. It strikes me that this is at least partly a social adaptation geared toward establishing or maintaining our power and authority. Even when there's no-one else around, it serves our ego to believe we are correct in our assessment or judgment about whatever it is. (Wikipedia goes into more depth than I will here.)

In the second instance, it is clearly the result of our evolution. People who mistake a shadow for a tiger may look foolish, but people who mistake a tiger for shadow wind up dead. In nature, there is often no time to consider the options available for review. As human beings, we tend still to attribute intelligent agency with a purpose to something before we turn a flashlight on the scary shadows.

Although the rewards of being the group leader sowed the seeds of ambition in all of us, the tribe had to have stability for the sake of all its members' survival, which is why humans also have an inbuilt instinct to respect the authority of the alpha male or alpha female.

I've learned much about this concept of the opinion leader back when I was in college and understand the *hows* behind gettng a bunch of ignorant saps to be led around by the nose if you get to their "alphas"(as a Comm. major I took a lot of marketring courses) - but for the life of me I could never understand it on a personal level. I felt lots of group pressure growing up from collective orders (the family, the church, etc...), but was never that affected by individual persons - I can't think of anyone I would consider an "alpha" to follow, as I've pretty much always regarded one person's opinion as being just that.

Thus, it's good news that the FTC is mulling requiring advertisers to report the average person's benefit from their product, rather than relying on "results not typical" testimonials. Marketers may howl, but in the long run it will help people make informed decisions and move the market as a whole in a more rational direction.

I'll bet $1,000 that these regulations won't ever pass: too much revenue would be lost if people knew the "truth" about the products being sold to them - advertizing relies on lots of hype, and the loss of that hype would be detrimental to sales and - by extention - the consumer economy. People have to keep buying shit for the consumer economy to exist, thus whatever gets people to buy things is "good" so far as business is concerned (and who are we kidding - big business practically owns the government).