I went to Vietnam a couple times. If you hang out downtown in the city, you might get a random Jehovah’s Witness or Seventh Day Adventist* try to chat you up. “Oh, we can’t do missionary work out in the open, so we just do one-on-one conversations like this”. Despite the lack of “Jesus saves, die sinner” signs in Hanoi, you can definitely find Catholic and Protestant churches in Vietnam.
The Western press likes to piss and moan about settler nation missionaries that go, without proper visas mind you, to spread their Western versions of Christianity to the DPRK, only to get deported. So am I allowed to enter a white people country without a visa to stir up trouble and expect no consequences???
I’m the furthest thing from an expert on Myanmar. I get everything I know from Burmese friends. But if you look into the minority people situation, many of them are being heavily proselytised by the worst of the Amerikan type. I don’t want the Pat Robertson’s the world anywhere near struggling people.
*I’m definitely not saying that JWs and SDAs are anywhere near the worst as Christian sects go.
Ah, I get it.
They should ban all earth-based religions and only allow ones that are introduced from space.
What I mean is that priority of aggression should clearly be given to the religions that wield or practically threaten to wield political power, like the Catholic or Orthodox churches, the evangelical bloc in America, and indeed many Eastern religious entities like, uh, Vajrayana Buddhism in Bhutan, for example, or the Tibetan church of old, before the PLA liberated Tibet. Unfortunately I think this puts Theravada on the chopping block since it has great clerical emphasis, but that’s just how it is. Reform Jews, miscellaneous protestants, the more decentralized branches of Mahayana, and other such religions are fine, we don’t need to gulag Shintoists unless they’re the Imperial kind.
But if you take my view as too liberal, then you may as well go banning space religions while you’re at it.
But if you take my view as too liberal, then you may as well go banning space religions while you’re at it.
spoiler
Sorry, I have to say this because you’re being so earnest in your responses, but I’m just trolling. I thought it was a completly absurd statement that nobody would take seriously… But a bunch of people ended up agreeing with me, so…
I think this board suffers pretty severely from orientalism, so it’s not that surprising. The fact that I struggled to condemn a specific Buddhism beyond the state religion of Bhutan is probably some evidence that I, too, orientalize a fair bit. My point is that, however joking you were, people are going to agree with it, so it deserves to be refuted to the extent that I’m able to refute it.
I don’t think it’s necessary to ban religion outright, but religious institutions need to be completely defanged and decoupled from the levers of power. I think we can keep the more historically and culturally significant traditions around as quaint cultural practices as long as they behave
My bad. As you can see, it’s at the edge of my ken, I’ve only ever known Jewish people who are so secular that they aren’t even in a sect anymore.
