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Comment by dschuetz | Hacker News Reader

It appears that China's government doesn't like organized Christianity, or any organized religion. It doesn't really matter what you personally believe. What matters though is anything that can influence people emotionally and philosophically, which basically means having control (thus power) over peoples' emotional and rational states of mind. Any place of congregation is potentially doing just that.

It's worrisome to see though that China has decided to go that extremely rigorous way, like burning crosses publicly and the like. Wow.

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China in particular has a good reason to be weary of organized Christianity ever since a guy claiming to be the younger brother of Jesus started a civil war that killed at least 20-30 million people: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Taiping_Rebellion

Yet China had good reason to be impressed by Marxism, also a Western import, because it killed 45 million. In that sense, I understand why Marxism would be more impressive than Christianity to a people who never had freedom. It won and killed more people.

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no true scotsman?

perhaps another 45 million would have done it.

Please stop using HN primarily for ideological battle. This is in the site guidelines, and we ban accounts that do it.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Besides, other sources say that the Pope and China have made a deal that bilaterally acknowledges both sides with compromises. China has a say in confirmation of bishops and China acknowledges the Pope as the head of church in China. So, "burning crosses" is a crackdown on independent or illegal churches and sects. The deal is not even a bad thing, it's revolutionary, in fact. (sauce: https://cruxnow.com/vatican/2018/09/26/pope-says-vatican-chi...)

Believe me, it's a huge betrayal of the faithful underground Catholics (speaking as a Catholic), who have been suffering persecution for decades.

It's a way of asserting government control over the Church in China, which is antithetical to freedom of religion.

For the Vatican to agree is a watershed moment in the history of the Church, and not in a good way.

Communist party of China used to be an organized religion, and quite a fanaticized one during the Cultural Revolution, that believed in a portfolio of Marxism-Leninism-Maoism ideologies and worshipped Mao personally. Religions and other old-school organizations were infiltrated and cracked down according to Leninism after the regime was set up in 1950s.

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