Prosletyzing

[The Mikado]

Eh.  The friendly, well-dressed young man saying "Are you familiar with the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints" isn't hurting me.

All of my bad experiences in this regard have come from Protestants, including one weird, weird Korean guy advocating the addition of "God the Mother" to the Trinity.  He smelled bad and was really insistent about God the Mother.

[The Mikado]

I just can't stand any double standards. So in a nutshell, I see absolutely no reason why evangelizing to people in remote Buddhist or traditional religion villages is different than the streets of some secular or mostly other Christian denominations city.

The difference is that in some cases you would destroy an entire culture or way of life. Thats why I am sceptical when we are talking about, say, kastom villages in Melanesia or Bhutan.
If you believe in human diversity as a valuable thing in itself (which I do) leaving some highly original and fragile aboriginal cultures to develop without missionary activity makes sense.
Otherwise I generally agree with your points about double standards.

I don't really agree.  Forcing people to continue to participate in brutal theocracies like old Tibet or Bhutan (which present friendly tourist-friendly faces to the West while continuing feudal, repressive practices) is pretty abhorrent to me.  How do you fit people like Tibetan Communists who were enthusiastically supportive of Chinese annexation and had fought against the Dalai Lama's oppresive theocracy for decades into this "nature preserve" system for lamaist theocracy in order to encourage human diversity?  It really demeans the people of Tibet to force them to live under Buddhist theocratic rule whether they continue to accept Buddhism or not just to keep humanity diverse on a religious map.

PS: I highly recommend A Tibetan Revolutionary: The Political Life and Times of Bapa Phuntso Wangye.  Bapa Wnagye was a Tibetan communist instrumental in helping Mao's takeover of Tibet, and fought for pretty much his entire life against the benighted Lamaist theocracy his people lived under.  He considers himself a fervent Tibetan patriot and thinks that the Chinese invasion was necessary to help modernize Tibet (though he regrets the Han chauvinism in Beijing and was arrested for years by the PRC at one point).  There's a great story in the book about how he, as a young man, saw a woman thrashed in the streets for selling the monks alcohol, and how she was being thrashed by the very monks who she sold it to.  The systematic hypocrisy and violence of the theocracy leads him into a lifelong campaign to free the Tibetan people from benighted lamaist rule. 

[The Mikado]

Proselytizing should certainly be allowed as a matter of freedom of expression, but the idea that there are no situations in which it's undesirable or culturally damaging strikes me as a little suspect. Then again, I'm completely obsessed with memory, diversity, and identity, so I would think that. I'm realizing more and more by the day that my views on the subjects of cultural history and (real or perceived) protection or assimilation are...uh, most other people would probably consider them really strange, and I'm starting to despair of ever finding a school of social theory that doesn't seem somehow, either definably or indefinably, wrong to me on this.

Nathan, I understand where you're coming from, but there's serious conflicts between cultural preservation and individual autonomy IMO.  Even without proselytizing, you'll have cases where people flat-out reject the culture and faith of their people and turn to an alternative, whether a foreign religion or something like Communism that has a similar function of leading people to renounce their traditional religion and join an international community opposed to it.  Should these people be denied that autonomy?  I really don't see how unless we go with an Afghan-style "apostasy=death" line.