- cross-posted to:
- nottheonion@lemmy.world
- worldnews@lemmit.online
- cross-posted to:
- nottheonion@lemmy.world
- worldnews@lemmit.online
In their effort to “exert total control” over religion and to “sinicise” Catholic and Protestant Christianity, the authorities have “ordered the removal of crosses from churches [and] replaced images of Jesus Christ or the Virgin Mary with pictures of President Xi Jinping,” the report said.
The report concluded that “every facet of religious life for Buddhists, Catholics and Protestant Christians, Muslims, and Taoists” was facing pressure to incorporate CCP ideology, and religious elements considered contradictory to the state’s political agenda were being eradicated.
Found this:
While we found evidence of both the removal of crosses from churches and the replacement of holy images with that of Xi in China, we find that the reports on the replacement of holy images with Xi to be potentially misleading in some ways in the social media posts.
"During the cold war, the anticommunist ideological framework could transform any data about existing communist societies into hostile evidence. If the Soviets refused to negotiate a point, they were intransigent and belligerent; if they appeared willing to make concessions, this was but a skillful ploy to put us off our guard. By opposing arms limitations, they would have demonstrated their aggressive intent; but when in fact they supported most armament treaties, it was because they were mendacious and manipulative. If the churches in the USSR were empty, this demonstrated that religion was suppressed; but if the churches were full, this meant the people were rejecting the regime’s atheistic ideology. If the workers went on strike (as happened on infrequent occasions), this was evidence of their alienation from the collectivist system; if they didn’t go on strike, this was because they were intimidated and lacked freedom. A scarcity of consumer goods demonstrated the failure of the economic system; an improvement in consumer supplies meant only that the leaders were attempting to placate a restive population and so maintain a firmer hold over them.
If communists in the United States played an important role struggling for the rights of workers, the poor, African-Americans, women, and others, this was only their guileful way of gathering support among disfranchised groups and gaining power for themselves. How one gained power by fighting for the rights of powerless groups was never explained. What we are dealing with is a nonfalsifiable orthodoxy, so assiduously marketed by the ruling interests that it affected people across the entire political spectrum."
-Michael Parenti, Blackshirts and Reds
The TLDR: Don’t criticize China, you’re wrong anyway.
Oh ya, it’s time for Hot Xi Summer.
An outrageous claim from the Telegraph. I need a second source.
because China has always been oh so welcoming of other religions right? Sources are great but calling this an outrageous claim is a bit much given the historical context.
I mean, it’s a pretty big step from “we need to pre-approve priests” to “actually, your religion is about something completely different now”.
And, more importantly, it’s the Telegraph. If it was the Guardian I’d go “gee whiz, that’s a whole new level, very unexpected”.
replaced images of Jesus Christ or the Virgin Mary with pictures of President Xi Jinping.
Its not saying actually Xi is your god now, its just making churches one more place where you see the dear leader. Still bad but not at the insane level of trying to rewrite one of the world’s largest religions.
I have a lot of doubts about this article, but also i bet i could find multiple instances of churches in certain states taking down pictures of jesus to put up pictures of trump.
This dude follows people into dark alleys for candy
Why is the telegraph bad, I really like their journalists they have always come across well.
Generally they write anti brown people propaganda.
Doesn’t it have a reputation for being a tabloid?
Yes. Yes it does.
From Media Bias/Fact Check:
Bias Rating: RIGHT
Factual Reporting: MIXED
Country: United Kingdom
MBFC’s Country Freedom Rank: MOSTLY FREE
Media Type: Newspaper
Traffic/Popularity: High Traffic
MBFC Credibility Rating: MEDIUM CREDIBILITY
other religions buddhism and taoism
Religion is the opiate of the masses and the CCP insists on being the only dealer around
That is soo messed up
That’s a fairly direct transition.
There’s a really good mod for Crusader Kings 2 where you play in a post-apocalypse America and one of the religion groups is Americanism, with the Founding Fathers as gods.
It’s supposed to be a commentary on the concept of the American civil religion but it’s mostly just awesome because NYC is still a Republic that follows one of the branches, and one of the starting families that rules Gotham is the Waynes :)
Reestablishing America as Batman wasn’t quite what I expected from a CK2 mod but it was the best possible way to say goodbye to the system before CK3 dropped.
Lmao that’s fucking hilarious.
NK levels of brain rot here we come!
Right on track to repeat the horrors of the past with complete blind faith in himself.
I can’t wait to watch him fall on his face royally.
Keep waiting, bud.
Yeah say whatever you want about Xi’s rapid descent into red fascism, his rule seems stable enough, and with how humans work it’s going to stay that way as long as the economy keeps growing. And it WILL keep growing because that’s just how industrialization works.
Saint Winnie the Pooh
Seriously the onion can’t keep up with reality.
she came into the manger, way overdue,
and plonked herself down next to the ewe.
then – leaning back on the cow –
did she, the great chairman mao,
immaculately embirth winnie the pooh.
Don’t give them ideas!
No, this would be a fun one to watch! Imagine them claiming that Xi is 2000+ yrs old and he just came to power…now?
the spectre of communism immaculately impregnated mao, who gave birth to xi.
The holy Xinity
Please someone paint a Mohammed with Mao or Xi’s face on it :)
the father son and holy ghost
The father, the son, the Winnie the Pooh.
I watched “The Man in the High Castle”, and the Christian imagery and symbolism in a former Christian Church were replaced with Nazi symbolism. I thought it was a bit farfetched, but now hearing something similar being done by China as part of totalitarianism, it is rather spooky. I’ve heard religious buildings being destroyed, but converting places of worship and blatantly removing its past to align with state ideology is far more surreal and haunting, and I am an agnostic atheist.
The end goal of fascism, per Mussolini:
“All within the state, nothing outside the state, nothing against the state.”
Fascism innately rejects the concept of the separation of powers and human rights alike.
If you view the traditional three pillars of heirarchy and power in a capitalist society as the state, the corporations, and the church, the absorbtion of both corporate and church power is simply the end goal. You might also ask “couldn’t the corporate powers or churches effectively do the same thing by absorbing the others instead?”
Funnily enough, Hirohito and Japan had already effectively absorbed that pillar of power with State Shinto and the literal deification of the imperial line.
Yeah that’s positive christianity and it was an actual thing.
This worked out great for Lenin and Stalin who just skipped the middle step and outlawed the church, then put their statues everywhere
The Chinese approach is far more effective I fear. The Soviet way worked only with mixed results and was more ideology driven than logical. In Poland, the Catholic Church became a huge factor in the opposition because of that. If religion is deeply rooted in society, controlling and steering religion makes for a powerful tool to control the masses while fighting it automatically makes it a strong opposition force.
Dictators always do that.
And, not because they’re atheists as the butthurt Christians so often claim.
It’s all about centralized control and not allowing for divided loyalties or spaces for people to gather outside the party’s control.
More often dictators take control of the church and use it for propaganda.
The US has it figured out, give the churches that support you special privilege
And slaughtered a lot of clerical people in the wake. There is a monastry where more than 1000 monks have been murdered under Stalins influence in Mongolia.
Overall tens of thousands of clerical people must have been murdered under Stalin
I had to double check to see if this was an onion article.
To be honest, I don’t trust The Telegraph any more than I trust The Onion. At least The Onion is straightforward about what they are.
The Onion is quite accurate, they just publish too early.
ಠ_ಠ
IYKYK 🤪
Ai had difficulty to do a nativity scene without Mary 😀
So techically these are Chinese sheeps, Chinese fodder, Chinese cloaks… A lot of things are coming to mind
A Chinese Mohammed A Chinese Jerusalem A Chinese Israel
Hey, finally, a religion tankies are comfortable with!
Upon further consideration, it was decided that perhaps what Marx had meant was that certain varieties of opium were, in fact, good for the people.
That’s not even a Chinese innovation. At least the Chinese gave Mao a proper burial instead of desecrating his corpse Christian saint/Lenin style.