Religious belief

The Chinese Communist Party has prioritized state ownership of mind and soul over state ownership of the means of production, and they are happy to use capitalism to achieve this goal.

THEast the week, Bitter winter published the first English translation of the new “Administrative Measures for Religious Clergy” from the Communist Party of China, which is due to come into effect on May 1.

The first of the measures is the creation of a comprehensive national database to register and track the state-authorized clergy of the five permitted religions (Protestant Christianity, Roman Catholicism, Islam, Buddhism and Taoism). Any dissident member of the clergy not registered in this database will be in immediate violation of the law. As Nina Shea observes, to register in the first place, the clergy will have to demonstrate that they “support the leadership of the Chinese Communist Party and support the socialist system.” Their loyalty to the CCP will then be assessed periodically in a manner similar to the country’s larger social credit system.

These measures are further proof of the eagerness of the CCP leadership to avoid the tactical mistakes made by the Soviet Union in the last century. The Chinese Communists are not trying to root out all traces of theism, thus inviting unchallenged opposition from believers and religious institutions (as the Soviets did about John Paul II’s Vatican). Instead, they attempt to piss off religious opposition to the regime by taming and co-opting national religious beliefs, turning them into another avenue for the regime’s social control agenda. For this reason, President Xi has prioritized the “sinicization” of religion in China, while demanding the prominent presence of his own image in every place of worship.

The tactical approach the CCP has taken towards the Roman Catholic Church is particularly instructive of how the party’s policy on religion differs from that of past (and even present) communist regimes when you consider the Kim’s in Korea. North). Instead of trying to completely oust the Catholic Church from China, the CCP seeks to increase its own influence over the Vatican. (They’ve taken the exact same approach to a lot of other things like America’s sports leagues, international institutions, and even capitalism itself.)

On September 22, 2018, the CCP signed an agreement with the Vatican – the text of which is still secret – according to which the two sides agreed to “cooperate” in the selection of Chinese bishops. In practice, this essentially means that the Chinese have presented their approved candidates to the Pope, who then officially approves them, almost as a formality. The whole affair reflects very poorly Pope Francis and the Vatican hierarchy. The hope was to allow Chinese Catholics practicing underground to come out of their hiding places and live their faith in public; but this “liberation” was bought at the cost of ceding all control over Chinese Catholicism to an atheist militant cabal of genocidal communists.

The naivety of the Vatican in accepting such an arrangement has been fully exposed by these new “administrative measures”: Conference of Chinese Catholic Bishops. No reference is made to the Pope or the Vatican, which were completely excluded from the process. The CCP consolidated its exclusive control over Chinese Catholicism with the formal support of the Catholic Church itself (the 2018 agreement was renewed last year), leaving the Party’s Chinese Catholic dissidents without even formal support. of their own church.

In other words, it’s not your grandfather’s evil empire. The CCP is smarter, more skillful, and more economically dominant than the Bolsheviks ever were. And at the moment, they are succeeding in putting Catholicism, along with the other great religions of the world, at the service of Marxism, which even Marx himself did not think possible.

As China’s only serious geopolitical rival, the United States also happens to be the most religious country in the developed world and the only country that views religious freedom as the first and most precious jewel in its constitutional crown. If a nation on Earth with geopolitical clout is to take serious offense at China’s war on religious freedom, it will likely be the United States. And yet, the American public does not seem to have an appetite for a large-scale geostrategic conflict with China. The political proposals for a new Marshall Plan to compete with the CCP’s Belt and Road initiative do not appear in our public conversations. Worse than that, the United States has not even been able to muster the collective will to offer American visas to Hong Kong people. The Cold War awareness that underpinned our enmity towards the Soviets in the last century is simply not a driving force today, although Communist China arguably poses an even greater challenge to the free world than the Soviets.

The most likely explanation for this has to do with the CCP’s signature tactics, as discussed above: they prefer to co-opt and manipulate people and forces instead of destroying them. Over the past few decades, they have done so precisely with regard to free trade and global capitalism. Chinese producers have clung to American consumers deeply and made the Party an indispensable part of the American (and global) economy. The CCP is deeply involved in our daily lives as consumers in a way that the Soviets never were. By making American consumers their economic vassals, the Chinese have neutralized any appetite for large-scale geopolitical conflict among the American ruling elite, which is woefully aware of what a policy of decoupling would likely mean for their own electoral prospects. If voters are offered the freedom of economic complicity in communist atrocities in exchange for higher prices, are we sure they would take the high road? You really have to wonder if the First Cold War would have ended as it did if the Soviets had dominated the prices in the American market.

The Chinese Communists did not try to destroy capitalism. They prioritized state ownership of mind and soul over state ownership of the means of production, and they were more than happy to use capitalism to achieve this goal. We in the free world were convinced after the fall of the Soviet Union that economic and political freedom was necessarily tied to the hip. We therefore sought the liberalization of the world economy in the sincere belief that political freedom would follow. It never occurred to us that the Communists of the future might not be interested in the nationalization of railways or post offices, but in the nationalization of childhood, love, death. , sex and Jesus Christ – and use the almighty dollar to do it. We never considered the possibility that the 21st century could turn out to be the darling of Margaret Thatcher and Deng Xiaoping.

Well, to borrow a phrase from Solzhenitsyn, the great truth has now emerged, especially for religious Americans. We in the free world have made the Chinese Communist Party the most powerful producer and consumer of a world capitalist economy. In one of the cruelest ironies in human history and the most treacherous paradoxes, Xi Jinping now walks the world as a Marxist brigand baron, a creature whose existence has eluded our categories of political thought during the last 200 years. With each new revelation of the CCP’s crackdown on religious believers, American clerics are faced again with the fact that even a harmless trip to Walmart could amount to an in-kind contribution to the massacre of the innocent saints; that the money we spend on our household goods goes into the pockets of the last days of Nero and Diocletian.

It is said that when it comes to China, Americans will have to choose between free trade and free markets, since China’s policy is to make markets non-free. It is even truer that, as far as China is concerned, American clerics will have to choose between free trade and religious freedom, because at the present time, American believers unwittingly finance the martyrdom of their co-religionists. Christianity (and most of the great religions of the world) views the faithful as an indivisible and supranational body. For this reason, religious Americans must lead the charge to decouple economically from China. They know that the short-term national economic interests of the United States are worth nothing more than ash and sand to the integrity and fellowship of the faithful. If American believers persist in acquiescing in China’s grip on the American consumer despite this knowledge, they shouldn’t be surprised to be greeted with a burst of heavenly light the next time they visit Costco, and with a voice crying, “Saul, Saul, why are you persecuting me?

A new study suggests that the conflict between science and religion is not universal but rather depends on the historical and cultural context of a given country. The results were published in Social psychology and personality sciences.

It is widely believed that religion and science are incompatible, with each belief system involving conflicting understandings of the world. However, as study author Jonathan McPhetres and his team point out, the majority of research on this topic has been conducted in the United States.

“One of my main areas of research is trying to improve confidence in science and find ways to better communicate science. To do that, we need to start to understand who is most likely to be skeptical of science (and why), ”McPhetres, assistant professor of psychology at Durham University, told PsyPost.

In addition, “there is a contradiction between scientific information and many traditional religious teachings; the conflict between science and religion also seems more pronounced in certain regions and for certain people (conservatives / evangelical Christians). So, I was partly motivated to see exactly how true this intuition is.

First, nine initial studies involving a total of 2,160 Americans found that subjects who scored higher in religiosity showed more negative implicit and explicit attitudes toward science. Those who are very religious also showed less interest in science activities and less interest in reading or learning science.

“It is important to understand that these results do not show that religious hate or dislike science. Instead, they’re just less interested compared to someone less religious, ”McPhetres said.

Next, the researchers analyzed data from the World Values ​​Survey (WEV) involving 66,438 subjects from 60 different countries. This time, when examining the relationship between religious belief and interest in science, the correlations were less obvious. While on average the two concepts were negatively correlated, the strength of the relationship was weak and varied across countries.

Finally, the researchers collected additional data from 1,048 subjects in five countries: Brazil, the Philippines, South Africa, Sweden and the Czech Republic. Here, the relationship between religiosity and attitudes towards science was, again, weak. In addition, a greater religiosity was actually linked to a greater interest in science.

Based on these results from 11 different studies, the authors suggest that the conflict between religion and science, although apparent in the United States, may not be generalized to other parts of the world, a conclusion that ” seriously undermines the assumption that science and religion are necessarily in conflict. Since the study used various assessments of belief in science, including implicit attitudes towards science, interest in science-related activities, and choosing science-related topics from a list of other subjects, the results are particularly convincing.

“There are many barriers to science that don’t need to exist. If we are to make our world a better place, we have to understand why some people may reject science and scientists so that we can overcome this skepticism. Anyone can contribute to this goal by talking about science and sharing interesting scientific findings and information with people whenever you get the chance, ”said McPhetres.

The study, “Religious Americans Have Less Positive Attitudes Toward Science, But This Does Not Extend to Other Cultures,” was authored by Jonathon McPhetres, Jonathan Jong, and Miron Zuckerman.

November 9 was the anniversary of the day the Berlin Wall began to fall. It was also the anniversary of the start of Kristallnacht, the Nazi pogroms against the Jews of Germany that took place in November 1938. This makes it an appropriate time for an audit of the progress, or lack thereof, in the protection of human rights in the world.

The United Nations Declaration of Human Rights (UNDHR) is our best way to define the simple demands of human dignity. But article 18 of the Declaration – the right to freedom of religious belief – is now violated globally.

British foreign policy has been equivocal in the promotion of rights. There was a highlight when Robin Cook was at the Foreign Office (FCO), but even his proposal for an “ethical dimension” to foreign policy was ridiculed. The low point has been the loss, under austerity, of a staff dedicated to human rights. Even lower has been Britain’s recent refusal to grant asylum to Asia Bibi, released from prison on false blasphemy charges in Pakistan.

In December 2018, Jeremy Hunt, Boris Johnson’s successor as foreign minister, asked the new bishop of Truro, Philip Mounstephen, former head of the Church Mission Society, to review the persecution of Christians in key countries of the world. He also urged him to analyze the FCO’s response to their plight and recommend a “coherent and comprehensive policy” against their persecution. It was a surprising announcement, as freedom of religious belief, let alone Christianity, had not been a priority in human rights work in the UK.

The Foreign Ministry’s neglect of religious persecution stems from at least two main causes. First, for the past two decades, the FCO has battled climate change, religious extremism, human trafficking, Brexit, Putin and Trump, to name a few. Second and most importantly, Britain has become a more openly secular country.

British officials are following government guidelines, yet diplomats have done nothing but lip service to promote religious freedom. A minority enjoyed contact with religious leaders and did their best to help people persecuted for their faith. And yet, the outcome of political directives seems to have depended primarily on the belief – or prejudice – of individual diplomats and officials. All embassies and high commissions received an FCO toolkit on freedom of religion, but a survey of diplomatic staff found that only 63% said they had implemented the provisions of the toolkit. Interviews with religious leaders and communities show that only a small minority of embassies and high commissions, mainly in the Middle East and North Africa, are active in providing effective aid to persecuted Christians.

The Bishop of Truro’s report, focusing on the persecution of Christians in the context of freedom of all religions, takes us back to the years after World War II and the origins of the Declaration of Human Rights of United Nations. The World Council of Churches’ Commission on International Affairs, headed by Lutheran theologian Dr Frederick Nolde, originally pushed for the fledgling UN to establish a Commission on Religious Freedom.

It soon became clear to the churches that these rights should be part of a larger declaration of other human rights. Eleanor Roosevelt was the first chairperson of a commission whose drafting committee produced the United Nations Declaration of Human Rights. The contribution of the British Council of Churches, the Conference of British Missionary Societies and the Greek Orthodox Minister of Foreign Affairs, Charles Malik, has been to add “the right to change beliefs” to the right to have beliefs.

In July 2019, Bishop Mounstephen produced a comprehensive and first-rate report, which exposes the extent of Christian persecution and places it firmly in the context of the broader decline in respect for the freedom of all faiths. The individual country assessments in the report make it fascinating, if not shocking, to read.

More specifically, the report calls for: an early warning system designed to prevent persecution; the integration of religious freedom into existing programs for democratization, development and peacebuilding; and religious literacy training for Ministry of Foreign Affairs staff. It also calls for a standard definition of persecution and a better understanding of the peculiarity of discrimination and persecution of Christians.

He also identifies the variety of triggers and drivers of Christian persecution. As the Bishop of Truro said in a recent meeting, “If you lift the stone of persecution and look below, what do you find? You find industrial-scale gang warfare driven by drug-related crime; there are authoritarian, totalitarian regimes that are intolerant of both dissent and minorities; you find an aggressive militant nationalism that insists on uniformity; you find religious fanaticism and fundamentalism in many different forms which often manifest in violence.

I hope the FCO will not put aside this important work. The situation deteriorated with Christians persecuted in 144 countries (up from 125 in 2015, according to the Pew Research Center). According to the organization Open Doors, 245 million Christians in the 50 most seriously offended countries are currently facing persecution.

Progress in the fight against religious persecution has been reversed, whether it is the cultural genocide of Uyghurs in China or the decline in the number of surviving Christians in the Nineveh Plain in Iraq (next to that there is a the tragedy of the Yazidis). Iraq’s Christian population has grown from 1.5 million before 2003 to around 120,000 today. Between 1990 and 2017, 45 Catholic priests and a cardinal were murdered by drug cartels in Mexico.

This report on the persecution of Christians is as painful as it is revealing. Politicians must be in a hurry to find out what they intend to do to implement its findings. A general election offers unique opportunities. As William Wilberforce said, reporting on the slave trade to the House of Commons: “You can choose to look away, but you will never again be able to say you did not know. “

Representative Ilhan Omar is building a track record strong enough to demonize entire swathes of America, and her latest target is the religious pro-life.

In a rant lasting several minutes better suited to “Mean Girls” than to the floor of the House of Representatives, the first-year Democrat from Minnesota accused pro-lifers of being “religious fundamentalists” who do everything from try “to impose their beliefs on a whole society” to “criminalize[ing] women just to exist.

Where to start ?

I guess we can start with how she positions herself as speaking on behalf of all American women. It’s the classic sexist trope that if you’re female, of course you’re pro-choice. Yet it was a woman, for example, who enacted Alabama’s pro-life bill. Almost half of women identify as pro-life, and women’s views on the issue of abortion cover the same range – in roughly the same proportions – as men. As Gallup recently put it, “men and women generally have similar attitudes about abortion,” with exactly the same percentage of both sexes agreeing that abortion should be completely illegal.

According to a recent poll, only 13% of women agree with Omar’s view that abortion should be unrestricted. Has anyone mentioned fundamentalism? More disturbing than his demagoguery on abortion on behalf of the female sex is the suggestion that Americans whose faith informs their pro-life views are bad faith hypocrites behind religious freedom. “I get frustrated every time I hear people talk about their faith and pass it on to others,” she said.

“We know these so-called religious politicians, when it comes to their lives, their choices, they want to talk about freedom,” she continued. “But when it comes to the lives of others and the choices of others, they want to talk about religion. It should offend every person. It certainly offends me, and we can’t stand it any longer.”

Wow. Someone please send the member of Congress a copy of the United States Constitution, which clearly states that faith is no more a disqualification from public office than a requirement – and that the Prime Amendment grants Americans a fundamental right to openly promote their faith in public. This is not a country where you are punished for expressing your beliefs. And this is not a country where our politicians use their platforms to shame people for their faith.

America gave Omar a chance to learn this lesson after offending the Jewish community with multiple remarks widely condemned as anti-Semitic just months after the deadliest attack on Jews on American soil. Interestingly, what his comments on the Jews have in common with his tirade against Christians is his fear of their influence.

It is the fanaticism of the textbooks. Creating fear of a group’s influence is a classic way of marginalizing them and increasing social opposition to them. He is deeply anti-American and must be denounced.

It is also misguided, because the contribution of the American faithful to civil society is a force for good. If there is one area where American clerics exercise extraordinary influence, it is not politics, but philanthropy. It is a known fact that people of faith are more likely to give charitably. As the Philanthropy Roundtable put it, “religion motivates giving more than any other factor”.

“It’s not Americans in high-income, urban, and liberal states like Massachusetts or California who are our most generous citizens,” adds Karl Zinsmeister, author of the Almanac of American Philanthropy. “Rather, it is residents of conservative, moderate-income, religiously active parts of Central America who are stepping up the most.”

Like the people of Alabama – who, according to Omar, are not “concerned about the children” – for example; they recently set a record for the number of children adopted into foster care.

Memo to Representative Ilhan Omar: You are not the judge of the sincerity of an American’s religious belief. You don’t speak for women. The country that elected you regardless of your faith deserves the same respect in return.

Events in the intervening days will also take place in silent arenas, missing the hundreds of thousands of spectators who paid $ 815 million for their now unnecessary tickets.

After 48 years of teaching the classics, I can’t help but wonder what the Greeks – who invented the Games almost 3,000 years ago, in 776 BC – would do such a ghostly version of their festival. Olympic.

In many ways, they would see the prospect as absurd.

In ancient Greece, the Olympics were never about the athletes themselves; instead, the heart and soul of the festival was the experience shared by all participants. Every four years, athletes and spectators traveled from the remotest corners of the Greek world to Olympia, drawn by the desire for contact with their compatriots and their gods.

In the shadow of dreams

For the Greeks, for five days in the heat of the end of summer, two worlds miraculously merged in Olympia: the realm of everyday life, with its human limits, and a supernatural sphere of time when higher beings, gods and heroes populated the Earth.

Greek athletics, like that of today, immersed participants in performances that pushed the envelope of human capacities to its breaking point. But for the Greeks, the cauldron of competition could spark revelations in which ordinary mortals could briefly mingle with extraordinary immortals.

The poet Pindar, famous for the victory songs he composed for the victors of Olympia, captured this kind of transcendent moment when he wrote: “Humans are creatures for a day. But what is humanity? What is it not? A human is only a shadow of a dream – but when a flash of light from Zeus descends, a brilliant light falls on humans and their lives can be sweet as honey. ”

However, these epiphanies could only occur if witnesses were physically present to immerse themselves in – and share – the dizzying flirtation with the divine.

Simply put, Greek athletics and religious experience were inseparable.

In Olympia, athletes and spectators made a pilgrimage to a sacred place. Modern Olympic Games can legitimately take place in any city chosen by the International Olympic Committee. But the ancient games could only occur in one place in Western Greece. The most moving events did not even happen in the stadium which hosted 40,000 or in the wrestling and boxing arenas.

Instead, they took place in a grove called the Althis, where Hercules is said to have first erected an altar, sacrificed oxen to Zeus, and planted a wild olive tree. Half of the festival events easily absorbed spectators not in feats like the discus, javelin, long jump, running and wrestling, but in feasts where animals were sacrificed to the sky gods and to long-dead heroes whose spirits still persisted.

On the evening of the second day, thousands of people gathered in the Althis to re-enact the funeral rites of Pelops, a human hero who once raced in a chariot to win the daughter of a local chief. But the culminating sacrifice took place on the morning of the third day at Zeus’ high altar, a mound of plastered ash from previous sacrifices that measured 22 feet high and 125 feet in circumference. In a ritual called the Hecatomb, 100 bulls were slaughtered and their thigh bones, wrapped in fat, burned at the top of the altar so that the rising smoke and aroma reached the sky where Zeus could savor it. .

Undoubtedly, many onlookers shuddered at the thought of Zeus hovering above them, smiling and remembering Hercules’ first sacrifice.

A few meters from the High Altar, another more visual encounter with the god awaited. In the temple of Zeus, erected around 468 to 456 BC. In one hand he held the elusive goddess of victory, Nike, and in the other a staff upon which his sacred bird, the eagle, perched. The towering statue was reflected in a puddle of shimmering olive oil surrounding it.

During the events, the athletes performed naked, imitating heroic figures like Hercules, Theseus or Achilles, all of whom crossed the line between human and superhuman and were usually depicted nude in painting and sculpture.

The nudity of the athletes declared to the spectators that in this holy place, the competitors hoped to reconstitute, in the ritual of the sport, the thrill of the contact with the divinity. In the Althis stood a forest of hundreds of naked statues of men and boys, all former victors whose images set the bar for aspiring newcomers.

“There are a lot of really wonderful things that one can see and hear in Greece,” noted the Greek travel writer Pausanias in the 2nd century BC. ”

Communion and community

The Greeks lived in around 1,500 to 2,000 small-scale states scattered throughout the Mediterranean and Black Sea regions.

Since sea travel in the summer was the only viable way to cross this fragile geographic network, the Olympics could inspire a Greek living in southern Europe and one residing in modern-day Ukraine to briefly interact in a festival celebrating not only Zeus and Heracles, but also the Hellenic language and culture that produced them.

Besides athletes, poets, philosophers and orators came to perform in front of crowds including politicians and businessmen, everyone communing in an “oceanic feeling” of what it meant to be momentarily united as Greeks. .

Egisto Sani / flickr, CC BY-NC

Now, there is no way to explain the miracle of television to the Greeks and how its electronic eye draws millions of viewers for modern proxy games. But the visitors to Olympia indulged in a distinct type of spectator.

The ordinary Greek word for someone who observes – “theatês” – connects not only to “theater” but also to “theôria”, a special type of seeing that requires a trip from home to a place where something wonderful. takes place. Theôria opens a door into the sacred, whether it is to visit an oracle or to participate in religious worship.

Attending an athletic-religious celebration like the Olympic Games transformed an ordinary spectator, a theatês, into a theôros – a witness observing the sacred, an ambassador bringing home the wonders seen abroad.

It’s hard to imagine television footage of Tokyo achieving similar goals.

No matter how many world records broken and unprecedented feats achieved at the 2020 games, empty arenas will attract no authentic gods or heroes: the Tokyo games are even less enchanted than previous modern games.

But while the medal count will bring fleeting glory to some nations and disappointing shame to others, perhaps a dramatic moment or two could unite athletes and viewers in an oceanic sense of what it means to be ” kosmopolitai ”, citizens of the world, celebrating the wonder of what it means to be human – and perhaps, briefly, superhuman too.

The ancient Greeks did not recognize certain aspects of the modern Olympics.

Vincent Farenga, professor of classical letters and comparative literature, USC Dornsife College of Letters, Arts and Sciences

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.