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.
That’s an incredibly cold take. Here’s a hot one: Liberation theology is not sufficient to justify Christianity’s continued existence.
Liberation theology is cleaning off the one good apple you found in the rotting pile of filth. It does not justify keeping the pile around, the pile should still be removed, the floor beneath it mopped, and any evidence of it destroyed outside of monuments to the janitors that removed the pile. And no you shouldn’t eat the apple from the garbage pile even if it looks okay.
If you need moral discernment to figure out which parts of your religion’s holy book are useful and which should be ignored, then the holy book isn’t working as advertised.
I mean all the holy books are in Actually Existing Churches a tool to control the worshippers, so when the worshippers don’t have the moral discernment outside of what the book (and better yet, priests) says, then it’s working as intended.
That’s why liberation theology seems self-defeating to me. Cherry-picking out the parts where he says to sell all your stuff and give the proceeds to the poor is all well and good so long as no one follows it up with all the other passages that undermine or contradict those passages. Either the Bible is true and accurate (in which case the balance of history is decidedly not on the side of socialism) or it’s inaccurate and you have to use some sort of moral reasoning external to the book, which throws into question the whole idea of submitting to an unreachable, uncommunicative, and unquestionable supernatural moral authority in the first place.
It feels more intellectually honest to me to just start from the position of atheism.
I agree there are people here who get their rocks off to muh liberation theology (including crassly projecting it on all sorts of inappropriate figures, including non-Christians!), but it seems like it could be a good tool for steering extremely religious communities toward pro-sociality on a temporary basis.
That’s my view on it. Religion in general is a very important factor in the lives of a lot of people throughout the globe, and for the most part most religions have some aspects that could map to socialism
Trying to insist on hard and fast atheism with people like that will cause pushback, where liberation theology could be used to get them on board with socialism and move later to an atheistic form
I think it’s pure idealism to think that a social phenomenon that predates class society will somehow go puff as soon as class society is abolished. Religion predates class society, so obviously whatever human need or social function it fulfills isn’t attached to class society.
Many adults cling to Christianity because it can function as a crude coping mechanism in an uncaring society: the appeal of a higher power caring for someone is easy to see, and religious institutions in general can be convenient sources of community, especially for somebody trapped in an antisocial culture like the United States of America. I am irreligious yet I feel more comfortable revisiting a Presbertyrian church than approaching my own neighbors.
Liberation theology is not a desperate attempt to fit a square peg in a round hole. For some Abrahamists, it simply feels natural or logical to them. I am willing to agree that theology of any sort is unnecessary for emacipating oneself, but it is—at best—a waste of time trying to convince somebody to discard it since they are already on our side and their spiritual beliefs are harmless. If their beliefs remain a big deal to you, though, then you need to understand that they are symptomatic and that addressing them directly would be the wrong approach to take.
Yes, the Church has frequently been complicit in colonialism. Yes, aggressive proselytization is always wrong. Nevertheless, we also need to acknowledge that many lower‐class Christians have rebelled against their oppressors despite mainstream Church teachings, and that they are reluctant to let go of their beliefs since they are convenient sources of comfort, not necessarily because they are worried about retaliation. Religion is a double‐edged sword. The ruling class has used it as an instrument of oppression, but that does not mean that it has never backfired either.
If you want an example of what happens when unfettered far right megachurch discourse is left to run amuck, just look at Latin America and where it will be in a few decades.
AES states have good reason to be wary of Western missionaries, since the missionary often accompanied the merchant as the tip of the capitalist spear that was trying to penetrate new markets. They were often then followed by the marine and the artilleryman. After which, the economist would survey the worth of the rubble that came in their wake.
That’s a pretty cold take, let me heat it up for you:
AES states should just outright ban Western religions. A Western country has a revolution? Yup, they ban their own religion.
I’m aggressively anti-Catholic and anti-Christian and I 100% agree with this statement.
Death to Christianity. The church is the biggest mafia of Poland, and this suck religion has caused untold amounts of harm.
inb4 “you are a reactionary bad take haver, religion can sometimes be good actually”
I don’t even fucking care no more, not after what the fuckers have done since 1989.
Alternatives to the bullshit shall be setup, every church (10357 of them) shall either be demolished or turned into museums.
Christians will be persecuted as bad as they think they were during PRL, Popiełuszko’s death will look like a fucking tea party.
Infinite genocide on the first world and every kkkrackkker defending it’s bullshit.
Rant overino :3333
I think churches should remain as sites of cultural significance,the old ones at least
Bad institution or not,they are still part of the cultural heritage and had a lot of work and skill put into them
The institution of the church can go the way of the dodo however
Nevermind,re read the comment
A cathedral with ornaments up the wazoo? Saved.
The local village parish? 🧨🧨🧨🧨💥💥💥💥💥🚫⛪🚫
Genuinely I believe Christianity is a scourge that must be eradicated. Many of its core beliefs (especially Catholicism and evangelical branches) are fundamentally at odds with building a good, healthy society that tries to improve life for all.
“Suffering is good for the soul” is too deeply ingrained, and it’s a belief that prevents doing literally anything good.
Credit where it is due, you did as advertised. That said, I think it is basically idealist to just ban western religions like they represent a significantly greater problem to the task of building communism than Eastern religions. There are some specific religions that need to be struggled against (the first step is probably not banning them), most notably Catholicism for its centralized organization around the reactionary institution of the Vatican, but it’s pure orientalism to think that whatever blase protestantism is really more of a threat to Vietnamese communism than Buddhism is.
I think Protestantism is a greater threat than Buddhism in Vietnam because that Protestantism is just a means for the West (and more specifically the US because let’s face it the majority of evangelicals are USians) to worm their way (back) into Vietnamese society while Buddhism is just part of traditional Vietnamese society. And as we saw with the self-immolation of Thich Quang Duc, Buddhism has played a progressive role in Vietnamese society before while Christianity in the form of Catholicism has always played a reactionary role in Vietnamese society. Of course, the fact that Buddhism is a part of traditional Vietnamese society doesn’t give it a pass and there will be reactionary branches and schools that must be crushed.
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.
Christianity isn’t a western religion, its western sects yes,but its origins are from the middle east
Have you read the bible? It’s written in English. Jesus spoke English when he wrote it
Nah but you have to consider that the current bible is mediated through the cultural reconstruction of the Catholic church. Various books discarded and translated into brand new meanings.
Many evangelical Christians will harp on about reading the King James version without ever considering that he changed and censored much of the translation that occured.
That’s not a hot take. Any religion or pseudo religion that came out of the US (reinventions of Calvinism over and over) is milimetrically designed to rot the soul and the societies it infects
