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.

  • ClimateChangeAnxiety [he/him, they/them]@hexbear.net
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    2 months ago

    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.

    • BeamBrain [he/him]@hexbear.net
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      2 months ago

      ✔️ Anti-woman up-yours-woke-moralists
      ✔️ Anti-gay gayroller-2000
      ✔️ Pro-slavery jb-shining
      ✔️ Pro-genocide pit

      If God existed, it would be necessary to abolish him.

    • BodyBySisyphus [he/him]@hexbear.net
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      2 months ago

      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.

    • GarbageShoot [he/him]@hexbear.net
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      2 months ago

      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.

      • TechnoUnionTypeBeat [he/him, they/them]@hexbear.net
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        2 months ago

        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

        • AssortedBiscuits [they/them]@hexbear.net
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          2 months ago

          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_Jewish_Cuban [he/him]@hexbear.net
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            2 months ago

            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.