That's how the one party rule will eventually end. Chinese trolls will probably downvote this comment into oblivion.
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China Cracks Down on Churches
201–210 of 245 posts
Re: China Cracks Down on Churches
#202Earlier quoted context omitted.
> ...Christianity, which by some estimates is China’s fastest-growing religion, promotes Western values and ideals like human rights that conflict with the aims of China’s authoritarian government This is the part that confuses me. I'm not sure what Christianity intrinsically promotes (ask 12 Christians and I suspect you'll receive 13 conflicting opinions). But practically speaking , governments and ruling classes ha…
I think you’re making the mistake of equating Christianity and Catholicism. They have the same roots but all of the things you’re assigning to Christianity is really the machinations of ‘The Church’ weilding Christians beliefs as a cudgel for the aspirations of ruling bodies. There is definitely a fine line between the two that is often blurred, but Christianity at its core is about people who are oppressed finding f…
> "I think you’re making the mistake of equating Christianity and Catholicism. They have the same roots but all of the things you’re assigning to Christianity is really the machinations of ‘The Church’ weilding Christians beliefs as a cudgel for the aspirations of ruling bodies."
I grew up in the rural South. I assure you churches serving as the cudgel of ruling classes is not limited to a single denomination. Catholics are barely represented here, the pattern is nevertheless the same.
Re: China Cracks Down on Churches
#203I'm not supporting China here, but the ideology "accepting all faith" is strange and, maybe, dangerous. Bible contains some cruel stories. But Christianity has a leader, which is Pope, who has ties with modern world and updates/rejects the stories from Bible, so it works decently enough with modern world. Other religions don't have that kinds of checks and balances. some religions just interpret whatever ancient book…
please read the Bible before you make such foolish claims >Christianity has a leader, which is Pope Christianity has one leader, and savior (Jesus) who's birth the world is celebrating today. Everyone else is merely a messenger of Christ, although there is an increasing number of false messengers looking to profit off Christ[mas].
Please don't cross into incivility regardless of how wrong some other comment is.
Re: China Cracks Down on Churches
#204Earlier quoted context omitted.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html "What to Submit On-Topic: Anything that good hackers would find interesting. That includes more than hacking and startups. If you had to reduce it to a sentence, the answer might be: anything that gratifies one's intellectual curiosity."
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…
The boundaries are not nearly as arbitrary as you imply. They are determined by what the community has the capacity to discuss while remaining within the site guidelines. If we did it any other way, HN would destroy itself.
Re: China Cracks Down on Churches
#205Why was this kicked off #1 of homepage and now can't be found but by direct link?
Nationalistic and religious flamewar are not only off topic here, they give off toxic fumes that poison the community. We put a lot of effort into trying not to let such forces destroy this place.
When indignation goes into the red, intellectual curiosity is the first casualty, so the mandate of the site requires moderation here. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
Re: China Cracks Down on Churches
#206I participate in Christian festivities and find them quite joyful. It's a wonderful time of the year for most of the world. However, whether countries should allow the propogation of religion and mythology is entirely up to them. Many countries have laws against various forms of deception - and religion straddles that line (of deception) so often. If action is being taken against the people who propagate "falsety" ra…
I am terrified of you and your monopoly on truth.
Religious flamewar and personal attacks are bannable offenses here. Please review https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and don't post like this to HN.
Re: China Cracks Down on Churches
#207Why is this even on Hacker News? Does the majority of readers here have the expertise to comment on the matter?
I suspect there is a strain of anti-Chinese sentiments here. When you see articles relating to black social issues, they immediately get flagged, but articles like these always get through.
There's no way for HN to be immune from macro trends. The macro trend right now, unfortunately, is polarization between China and the West. As I'm sure you've noticed, this has been manifesting dramatically in Western media over the past months. Since the audience here is mostly Western (50% US, 30% Europe, 7% Canada plus Australia, IIRC), it's inevitably going to identify more with one side than the other.
We moderate HN to mitigate the worst aspects of this, but there's no hope of eliminating it. HN is controlled by its community. All that moderation can do is adjust the margins.
Re: China Cracks Down on Churches
#208Earlier quoted context omitted.
I suspect there is a strain of anti-Chinese sentiments here. When you see articles relating to black social issues, they immediately get flagged, but articles like these always get through.
There's no way for HN to be immune from macro trends. The macro trend right now, unfortunately, is polarization between China and the West. As I'm sure you've noticed, this has been manifesting dramatically in Western media over the past months. Since the audience here is mostly Western (50% US, 30% Europe, 7% Canada plus Australia, IIRC), it's inevitably going to identify more with one side than the other. We modera…
You can absolutely eliminate it, you just don't want to because it would cost too much.
I suppose macro trends would also explain why black social issues always get flagged on HN as well.
Re: China Cracks Down on Churches
#209Earlier quoted context omitted.
My use of English isn't very good, I apologize. Let me give a thought experiment. Let's say: one religion believes that the person who leaves that religion should be killed Should I be ok with the person with this religion? Should I do something about this? I want to say there are good practices and bad practices. But our ideology is to accept all of them. That's not good.
Religions don't believe things, people believe things. Many religions, if the text of their holy books are taken literally, support violence, sacrifice, slavery, etc. And religions are practiced in different ways in different times, and different places. Not every religious person is an extremist. My opinion is that you should judge people by the way they actually behave, not by the worst possible interpretation of h…
> Many people follow supposedly "violent" religions peacefully alongside other faiths.
This is what I originally meant. I think you understand. We might use different words for the same thing here.
Christian people in the western world would reject many stories in the Bible. Even Pope seems to reject some ancient ideas from the Bible.
Or you can say I consider the old Christianity to be a different religion from the modern Christianity. Because the sets of beliefs differ.
But, in other parts of the world where society isn't as "developed", we just follow blindly what (most of) the book says. We reject very little. Since the book is often ancient, it becomes problematic.
At least, for me, it doesn't even need to be an action. For example, if a person believes that women are properties of men because the religion says so, I wouldn't want to accept that religion. (Let's say that person says it out loud)
Please note, by accepting, I mean "being okay that the person next to you practice this religion". In other words, you can live together in the same area.
Re: China Cracks Down on Churches
#210Earlier quoted context omitted.
You have a grave misreading of the history of Christianity. It was used as a control device when it was centrally controlled and delivered (like all religions)...the invention of the printing press changed all of that with the Reformation. Once the knowledge was spread through the people and open to interpretations, the general direction of Christianity (despite all the faults of modern movements) has trended towards…
In Chinese history it's a little different. The Taiping rebellion was a militant uprising against the ruling Manchus by a Christian Millenarian sect known as the Taiping Heavenly Kingdom, in the mid 19th century. It was the bloodiest war of the 19th century, and the bloodiest civil war in history, with an estimated 20-70 million killed. You don't have to agree with China's response to these chruches, but maybe you ca…
> In Chinese history it's a little different. The Taiping rebellion was a militant uprising against the ruling Manchus by a Christian Millenarian sect known as the Taiping Heavenly Kingdom, in the mid 19th century.
> You don't have to agree with China's response to these chruches [sic], but maybe you can understand why they get nervous when Christians start getting uppity.
That's just a pretext, if anything. This oppression isn't some challenging but benevolent attempt by the Communist Party to protect China from a bloody civil war based on past historical experiences, it's part of systematic campaign to protect the personal and institutional power amassed by China's unelected leaders and keep the country submissive to them.
This is clear when you look these actions in context: the repressive actions against democracy activists before, after, and on June 4th 1989; as well as more recent actions against human rights lawyers (https://www.nytimes.com/2017/07/25/magazine/the-lonely-crusa... ); and even Communist true believers acting outside of party control (https://www.nytimes.com/2018/11/11/world/asia/china-student-... ).