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.
acab includes jehova
GOOD post
✔️ Anti-woman
✔️ Anti-gay
✔️ Pro-slavery
✔️ Pro-genocide
If God existed, it would be necessary to abolish him.
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 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
Hey it me
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.
The changing base recreates the superstructures upon it. I don’t disagree that it may not go “poof” and disappear, however the liberation of production and centralization of power in the hands of the workers creates new paradigms that may or may not undermine the foundation that foments religious belief I the first place.
Jesus was pretty based but that doesn’t justify saying there’s much to learn from the rest of the book.
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.
Or Uganda
Or just look at what happened in Uganda.
Thinking about how we haven’t hit rock bottom in that sense is so fucking dreadful
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.
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.
But if you take my view as too liberal, then you may as well go banning space religions while you’re at it.
spoiler
Sorry, I have to say this because you’re being so earnest in your responses, but I’m just trolling. I thought it was a completly absurd statement that nobody would take seriously… But a bunch of people ended up agreeing with me, so…
I think this board suffers pretty severely from orientalism, so it’s not that surprising. The fact that I struggled to condemn a specific Buddhism beyond the state religion of Bhutan is probably some evidence that I, too, orientalize a fair bit. My point is that, however joking you were, people are going to agree with it, so it deserves to be refuted to the extent that I’m able to refute it.
I’m not sure if it’s necessarily just Orientalism. Most posters here tend to be Western, white and have probably had some kind of Christianity-adjacent upbringing so they’re understandably wary about going off about non-Western religions they’re not that familiar with. I don’t think many people here would be comfortable declaring that we need to abolish Islam and Judaism either. They just don’t want to come across like a Western chauvinist
I think it’s just “grass is greener” thinking.
I don’t think it’s necessary to ban religion outright, but religious institutions need to be completely defanged and decoupled from the levers of power. I think we can keep the more historically and culturally significant traditions around as quaint cultural practices as long as they behave
Reform Jews, not Reformed
My bad. As you can see, it’s at the edge of my ken, I’ve only ever known Jewish people who are so secular that they aren’t even in a sect anymore.
It’s all good, even the Judaism subreddit (don’t go there, it’s ass) had a bot that would automatically make this correction when posted, its a common one even for people that are religious/deep in the sects
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
Long before the American empire, proselytizers had been the shock troops of colonization. Hence that quote about how when the Europeans showed up, they had the Bibles and the Africans had the minerals. Now the Europeans have the minerals and the Africans have the Bibles.
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.
Is this a quote or did you write this? 🔥✍️🔥
I came up with it on the fly.
If I go to Vietnam and get one of these guys bothering me, can I call the cops and have them taken away?
Like theoretically
You’d probably run the risk of inciting an international incident if they’re foreign.
That’s my favorite kind of incident!
lmao i’m glad i’m not the only one who thought that would be the funniest response
Don’t be a cop-caller. Just tell them to fuck off.
I said theoretically.
But also what’s worse, a colonizer or calling the cops on a colonizer?
I don’t think it’s worse, but it’s still pretty weak imo.
this is the coldest of all possible takes
A take so cold it ended brat summer
I agree, Christians in the global south countries can become complete nutjobs because of foreigners.
How is this a hot take at all? Evangelicalism shouldn’t be allowed anywhere.
The Sentinelese have the correct response to missionaries. First shoot their bibles as a warning then shoot them if they don’t leave.
Fuck Evangelicals. Nobody should deal with their pestering or bothering.
Thanks for cooling things down with that mild take, I’ve been excited about fall coming for weeks now.
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.
Remember how John Allen Chau got owned? lol
