I’ve made the point a many times here that Obama’s health care bill was mostly an assault on the remaining Christian holdouts in American society. It may have started as an “honest” attempt to move the country closer to state run health care, but it became an excuse to take aim at Christians. As is always the case with the Left, economics is subordinate to culture.
If you look at the controversial bits of that bill, they all revolve around making Christians do things that are against their faith. Making Churches offer health coverage to homosexuals couples or making Catholics buy rubbers for their employees has nothing to do with health and everything to do with the culture war. If you force people to act in contradiction of their faith, they will eventually lose their faith.
At least that has been the thinking for 2000 years. Now we see the ChiComs doing the same thing with their Muslims.
Chinese authorities have ordered Muslim shopkeepers and restaurant owners in a village in its troubled Xinjiang region to sell alcohol and cigarettes, and promote them in “eye-catching displays,” in an attempt to undermine Islam’s hold on local residents, Radio Free Asia (RFA) reported. Establishments that failed to comply were threatened with closure and their owners with prosecution.
Facing widespread discontent over its repressive rule in the mainly Muslim province of Xinjiang, and mounting violence in the past two years, China has launched a series of “strike hard” campaigns to weaken the hold of Islam in the western region. Government employees and children have been barred from attending mosques or observing the Muslim fasting month of Ramadan. In many places, women have been barred from wearing face-covering veils, and men discouraged from growing long beards.
American Progressives can only dream of such heavy handed tactics, but they are not deterred. The next round of “health care reform” will probably mandate homosexual marriage for Catholics. That sounds ridiculous, but consider that two guys getting married was a punchline just twenty years ago. There are men alive today who recall when being on welfare was shameful.
In the weird theocracy of empire America, yesterday’s absurdities are today’s conventional wisdom. Today’s commonly held truth is tomorrow’s heresy. In 1982, everyone knew that you could not become president if you led a private life of perversion. In 1992 everyone knew that you would not run for president, much less win, if you were a black guy raised overseas and were named after the dictator of Iraq.
Having government minders in churches making sure no one says anything unapproved may sound crazy today, but how far fetched is it really? The mayor of Houston demanded the right to pre-approve all church sermons not so long ago. The Supreme Court just heard a case where one side was demanding that large chunks of Christianity be ruled a thought crime.
This will not end well.
At least unlike our government, the Chinese government doesn’t try and pretend their business people live in a free society where they can operate their businesses as they choose.
At least the Chinese have the balls to keep the Moslems in their place, unlike the West, which is still letting them pour in by the thousands, allowing them to bring their 7th century mores with them. We give them welfare benefits and they have zero intention of assimilating. The Chinese know that the Moslems will not assimilate and know that they cannot make concessions to Moslems. You give the Moslems an inch and they will take a mile or more.
Jack Chick…….there’s a blast from the past. In high school in the late 70s my friends and I came across a couple of his publications……..we thought they were the funniest things we had ever read.
It wasn’t so much the message (remember, we were in high school, so we couldn’t have fathomed a message if we tried)………It was the hilarious artwork and the cartoonish dialogue that got us rolling on the floor.
(BTW – Chick is still with us, at 91.)
I think the old Soviet constitution called it “Freedom of religion and anti-religious propaganda.”
How do you do samizdat in a networked society?
As I wrote elsewhere, life becomes more like a Jack Chick comic every day.
A couple of years ago, I was way off the information super highway for a few days, and as is my wont, I fired up the ol’ portable shortwave receiver hoping to catch some news. Later investigation revealed that most of big players in that realm are pulling out of shortwave and have taken to cruising the data autobahn. So I was stuck listening to a very middle-class sounding, Christian conspiracy theorist. His premises were all jacked up, but his conclusions were pretty close to mine. Given that what we call “reason” is most of the time your forebrain building grammar and syntax around what the more ancient parts of your brain have already figured out, I knew in my gut (representing a very ancient part of the brain, indeed) that we were in trouble.
The great advantage to the Progressive Church is that you receive a sermon and an inspection every day.
There are already Christian churches that approve of abortion, gays, etc. Forcing all Christian churches to “change” to suit Hillary Clinton is not necessary. Maybe you are not a Catholic Christian, but the Methodists will accept you and bless your gay marriage and approve of the abortion or abortifacts that you desire. I thought one of the recent Obamacare court cases ruled that a least restrictive measure was available on birth control, so is a least restrictive religion.
The Episcopalians have embraced all of the latest social trends. Their churches are empty. Christianity worked when it stood apart and appealed to the heavens for moral legitimacy. Once it became just another pawn on the chess board, it lost its utility. That’s the aim of the American Progressive. Once all other religions are subordinate to the one true faith, there’s really no reason for those others to exist.
Yep, that is the aim, get rid of Christianity. As going to church is a voluntary action, like marriage, it just seems like if you don’t believe that a certain church’s doctrines are correct, you need to keep shopping. To force a church and its members to participate in someone else’s voluntary action seems bizarre.
That would be some Methodist’s,, the behavior of Sodomites is still frowned upon technically in the UMC Book Of Dicipline.
Technically that may be true. As practiced by my lay minister brother in law, no. He recently decided there is not god, that it is a figment of the imagination. As a Methodist he was for gay marriage, ordination of women, euthanasia, abortion and heavy government social policies like single payer health care. And he preached that in addition to long family dinner prayers. When your church turns a blind eye or condones those things, it is easy to see why someone would lose faith. That type of Christian faith is indistinguishable from secular religion.
It’s odd that people seem to think of the current Chinese government as eternal. They have their internal discontented just like all nations. Ask Chaing Kai Shek. Admittedly, it might take them 500-1000 years, but they can change radically.
Christianity is immoral. Any religion that discriminates against people has to go.
That would be any religion that exists. Including Atheistkult.