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.
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.
I agree, Christians in the global south countries can become complete nutjobs because of foreigners.
The primary issue where religiom becomes an issue is when it acts as an agent of state interests against the interests of revolution. It was part of the old guard against liberalism and in favor of colonialism and feudalism and has a many-faced character nowadays, Being leverageable both for recolutiin and against revlolution.
Abstractly, it is not an issue re: revolution. It only becomes relevant in terms of real world on-the-ground impacts that are best resolved by local revolutionaries that ask the right questions and do the right work.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
