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China Cracks Down on Churches

nytimes.com

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Re: China Cracks Down on Churches

#231

Post by candiodari »

acqq wrote: post #170
skymt wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

China has party-authorized Christian churches with exactly your goal in mind. This crackdown is on unauthorized churches. For an example of how they frame it in propaganda: http://en.people.cn/n/2014/0807/c90882-8766262.html

It matches what’s written in the OP article: “The government has focused its campaign on unofficial Christian churches that promote ideas like social justice or have been critical of the party’s grip on society.” And knowing what’s documented about the CIA activities in the past, which include using religion(1) I fully understand that attitude. 1) See https://dgibbs.faculty.arizona.edu/brzezinski_interview but also w…

Focused ? Why that word ? That's very different from only unofficial churches ?

This is a fact that comes back in the stories of Chinese people very often: it doesn't matter how "approved"/legal or tolerated something is. Parts of the government go after it. Parts of the party are in open war with eachother, to the point that they send child services after eachothers' children, police after restaurants that commit the crime of allowing political rivals to eat there, and then there's the occasional moral panic, which is the most disruptive. Every now and them some fact will make the news, through social media most often.

This may be quality of goods (food for children happened once, but has likewise happened with houses, animal feed, ...), relationship stuff (e.g. a young couple, a girls pictures "leaking", in some cases outright racism (romeo and juliet couple), ...) someone dying from exhaustion while gaming, a few people very sick or dead from food poisoning, hospitals getting caught abusing psychological patients, ... and then the police will take "action".

By that of course we mean arresting hundreds whose only crime is to be in the same street as where the news event happened. Or arrest everyone under 16 out after 18h. Or arrest everyone including owner and customers in every internet cafe, or real cafe. Or ...

They're innocent. Doesn't matter of course. They get convicted. And yet, under normal circumstances, anyone in China will tell you it's absurd what you get away with.

Re: China Cracks Down on Churches

#232

Post by dahidahi1 »

dang wrote: post #194
dahidahi1 wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So if I get your drift, someday you'll support the "freedom of expression" of terrorists? The church is known to indulge in borderline terrorism, just fyi. This is at least in the case of India. We suffer it every single day.

This comment and your others in this thread have broken the site guidelines badly. We ban accounts that do religious flamewar. Please don't post like this again. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html Edit: looking further, since you have a history of abusing HN in this way, I've banned the account. Please don't create accounts to break the site guidelines with.

Ooh blasphemy law? So Hacker news is the new Pakistan. You must be really proud of yourself.

Re: China Cracks Down on Churches

#233

Post by rohit2412 »

starbeast wrote: post #230
rohit2412 wrote: post #228

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

>why do you take their opinion as "kill all religious people" I don't, I haven't said that anywhere. >it is absurdly stupid to say that religion is source of all evil Yes it is absurdly stupid. This is the point I have been making. Repeatedly. It is a very stupid position to take.

That's what you said

> "Once you have started believing that religion is the root of all evil, you do not have to travel very far at all to find yourself persecuting the religious. "

Re: China Cracks Down on Churches

#234

Post by starbeast »

77pt77 wrote: post #158
NedIsakoff wrote: post #15

Are you surprised? China suffered 20-30 million deaths under the "Brother of Christ". It does not want another "Brother" or "Sister"..

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Taiping_Rebellion For those not getting the reference,

I did not get the reference and reading through, this is something I know very little about. Thank you for providing a link.

Re: China Cracks Down on Churches

#235

Post by therealdrag0 »

chillacy wrote: post #149
RyanShook wrote: post #97

The paradox is that the more the government cracks down on Christianity, the more it will likely flourish.

Why do you think that’s true? China has cracked down on: democracy in the 80s, Falun Gong, Tibet, Islam, and now Christianity. None of the previous groups have “flourished” yet. Some have basically died, others had to go abroad to survive, none are mainstream in China l.

History is unpredictable, but Christianity has a long tradition of persecution, with even a lot of primary texts (Bible) supporting it, so it is an expected/welcomed experience. This can give the followers a lot of strength under persecution.

Examples:

2 Timothy 3:12 - "Indeed, all who desire to live a godly life in Christ Jesus will be persecuted,"

John 15:18 - “If the world hates you, know that it has hated me before it hated you."

Or just think of the story of Jesus; when the main character(s) in your religion gets beaten and killed, the followers really feel like they're on the right path when it happens to them too.

Re: China Cracks Down on Churches

#236

Post by dahidahi1 »

SubiculumCode wrote: post #76
dahidahi1 wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why is the church indulging in criticism? Who are they? What right do they have to do that? How do they know that the officials are corrupt? How do you know that is the only thing the church did, if they even did that? How do YOU know for a fact that the official was corrupt? Too many questions & you seem to be naive enough to take everything at face value. Again, why does the church interfere in such things? Isn't t…

>Why is the church indulging in criticism? Who are they? What right do they have to do that? From my part of the world, a damn human right.

[dead]

Re: China Cracks Down on Churches

#237

Post by lgleason »

throwaway2048 wrote: post #181
dgzl wrote: post #177

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Could you explain this?

https://wwi.lib.byu.edu/index.php/Norman_Angell%27s_The_Grea... An excerpt from a book by Norman Angell, (Nobel Peace Prize winner, lecturer, journalist and MP) in 1910 as to why wide scale war could not happen between major powers. [War] belongs to a stage of development out of which we have passed that the commerce and industry of a people no longer depend upon the expansion of its political frontiers; that a natio…

I guess the leaders at the time forgot to read his book ;)

Re: China Cracks Down on Churches

#238

Post by dang »

PavlovsCat wrote: post #229
dang wrote: post #204

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> what the community has the capacity to discuss while remaining within the site guidelines Which is arbitrarily decided on a case by case basis. It seems stuff just gets flagged off the front page by users, and sometimes it has the [flagged] thing, sometimes it doesn't. People can already hide topics from the front page for themselves, and blissfully ignore them. What is the point of flagging things, are there limit…

I'm not sure I understand the grievance here. HN is not all kinds of website, it's just one kind of website. Its mandate is defined by https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html, most importantly the bit about intellectual curiosity. Everything else more or less follows from that.

Flamewars destroy intellectual curiosity, so we have to moderate them. If we didn't, they would grow until they consumed everything. That would drive away the users who are here for curiosity. That's what I meant about the site destroying itself.

Curiosity as a motivation on the internet is vulnerable—it doesn't scale. That forces us to intervene in various ways, some of which appear arbitrary at times, if only because providing full explanations of every case would take lifetimes. But people are always welcome to email hn@ycombinator.com and ask for clarification. What we can't do is not intervene at all and just surrender to internet default, because that would be giving up on the site mandate.

Re: China Cracks Down on Churches

#239

Post by Guereric »

rasengan wrote: post #88

I can’t believe the people’s names were exposed. I hope those were pseudonymns.

I was surprised by this and the amount of detail regarding the workarounds by the local dissenters. Nowhere in the article did it state that PII was masked.

I wonder if the assumption is that, all the descriptions in the article are already known to the CCP.

Re: China Cracks Down on Churches

#240

Post by perfmode »

onetimemanytime wrote: post #190
perfmode wrote: post #188

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> What China is doing is very logical: The ends can never justify such means.

the word logical was used to include "morals aside." China knows what they want and to go there they are smart and dumb ways.

I don’t think morals with respect to shared notions of fundamental human rights can be “put aside” for the sake of discussion.

What is the discussion worth if it doesn’t take into consideration fundamental dignity?

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