I'm really wasn't getting your viewpoint at all. I am really trying to understand something here.

Your original post:

One of my favorite quotes is by Henry David Thoreau: "If you see a man approaching you with the obvious intent of doing you good, you should run for your life." (I worked it into a sampler and it's hanging in the living room.)

You found this profound enough to hang in your living room. It is a noble idea--I have seen it referred to by libertarians as "Thoreau's Law"--and one of many quotes libertarians like. The one about "that government which governs best, governs least" isn't bad either.

But when you think of someone coming to you and forcing help upon you that is neither needed nor wanted, apparently the first thing that comes into your head is some kind of evangelist. You wrote:

I find the prospect of being "saved" much scarier than any government "help".

It's been my experience that religious organizations are bossier and more intrusive. Governments can jail you and take your property; churches can, and do, isolate and ostracize citizens, making them targets and prisoners in other ways. Ask someone who's been driven into bankruptcy because of a whispering campaign concerning his lack of "righteousness".

Certain flavors of a particular demoni-- oops, denomination have co-opted a major party in the US; they have governmental power too, exercised in an oblique way.

"demoni..." Cute. I'm sure the people I go to church with on Sunday fit into that category.

An evangelist or religious busybody never even occurred to me. It has been your experience that religions are more intrusive than the government. Again, good grief, where do you live? Innsmouth? Do your local religions control even a fraction of the things your government controls? Do the churches in your neighborhood take a third of your income (even the LDS only takes a tenth)? Do you really know someone driven into bankruptcy by a local church? I've never heard of such a thing.

I really thought I was dealing with a complete paradigm gap here. Anyone I know that I threw that Thoreau quote at would have applied it to the ever-growing nanny state, maybe getting as specific as a county social worker, business regulator, or zoning official, depending on who I was talking to. But I hang with libertarians. Do most people around you feel as you do? That the midnight knock on the door someday will come from a guy with a stiff white collar?

I needed more information, and spent a good hour trying to track the Thoreau quote down in context. I dare say you are more literate than I am, and I figured maybe Thoreau was actually specifically talking about a country preacher when he said it, so that my whole line of thinking would be off the track.

It was a bitch, but I found the quote in a portion of Walden 3. The whole quote is quite interesting, and I enjoyed the parts about how he ate and lived, but the quote on philanthropy did not seem specifically aimed at the religious.

(Aside: Thoreau should have known that Indians did pursue salt, and its trade figured prominently in pre-European America. And squirrels can eat dried corn because they have eternally replenished teeth.)

In any case, I'm not trying to be offensive. I'm trying to understand the filter that fears some violations of individual rights and ignores larger ones.