China Cracks Down on Churches

I'm a left wing atheist. While people like Dawkins and Hitchens may declare religion the root of all evil, I try to have some self awareness on the subject. I look at the 20th century and need only pick two names, Stalin and Mao, to find left wing atheism being drenched in blood.

Killing for a dogma is the issue. And those who claim that religion is responsible for all misery are precious few philosophical steps away from doing exactly that.

edit - for some perspective, here's Tony Benn on the many links between socialist ideologies and christianity. - https://jacobinmag.com/2018/12/tony-benn-christianity-social...

edit2 - For another perspective, while the crackdown on christianity is harsh, the crackdown on muslims is next level. Which is odd on the face of it as muslims tend to be more left wing in practice than christians.

The only religion that I can think of that doesnt do that is Wicca.

Even Buddhists, along with Shakyamuni as this source, laid down much more restrictive rules for women adherents to Buddhism.

Edit: go figure. Mention facts and you're -1'ed to currently -3. And it wasn't even demeaning or harassing.

But then look at the front page, look how it never applies to everything, not even close, and how trivial, cute subjects never get these complaints.

People are avoiding their own responsibility and don't like when others exercise it. Since I can only guess anyway, that's my guess. What I know for a fact is that the reasons against such a topic simply being where the interest of people puts it, do not hold water, that is, are always selectively applied. That in itself is intellectually interesting, but we are not allowed to personally question posters on HN too much, even when it's done it's barely rewarded with an honest reply, so we aren't intellectuals enough for that stuff. It's pointless to talk about the aggregate of a group when individuals remain opaque, so the whole subject is simply beyond our reach, as intellectually stimulating and important as it may be.

We should know what a double standard is though: If we can pretend wiggly lines satisfy our intellectual curiosity, we can take note of a country that already build massive concentration camps to "re-educate" millions of muslims now does this. We can also take note of the comments welcoming it, and ponder those. But again, that's mostly homework, we don't have the culture capable of doing this as a "community" apparently. That's a "flamewar" or whatever. We don't like growing pains, so we won't grow, that is pretty much settled.

In America, "terrorism" is a term used to justify all sorts of suppression of fundamental rights—usually directed as a religious minority. There is both government and social suspicion of Islamic groups that have no connection to terrorism, they just make people uncomfortable. I strongly, strongly support the freedom of expression of people in the US under vague suspicion of terrorism.

And even Christians in the US can get on the wrong side of this. My old church has a Hispanic congregation that worships in the early afternoon, and some ICE agents came by, not to worship, but because they heard there was a "large Hispanic celebration." My pastor dragged them out. https://theintercept.com/2018/01/19/ice-new-sanctuary-moveme... I can see a very small distance from where we are in the US to declaring that sanctuary churches are aiding terrorism, to defining (as in China) a state-friendly Christianity that is acceptable because it reinforces the desired social engineering of the powerful and a rogue Christianity whose believers need to be arrested for reasons of national security.

(Full disclosure, I am ethnically an Indian "St. Thomas Christian," and although I was born and live in America I was baptized in India, so I might be slightly reacting to your comment out of that. I don't think I am, though, although I certainly haven't kept up with the facts on the ground in India.)

both. I doubt it will stop it in China directly, but if you continue to support them economically this is more likely to spread as they gain more global influence. Ideally there should be none, but if you can't have that containment is the next best thing otherwise you expose a larger population to it.