Don’t know that I’d say plenty. A quick look on wiki shows that 3/4 of China is either atheist or otherwise irreligious.
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We’re getting there quicker than most 1st world countries I believe…I don’t know anyone who identifies as religious except my local shop keeper.
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I’d like someone who has spent time there to chime in, but I wonder if westerners have some trouble recognizing the very different belief systems as religious. Are a huge percentage of Chinese people really scientific rationalist skeptical realists with no faith or practice around anything supernatural?
This was my thought, too. My understanding (have done ~0 reading on the topic) was that many Chinese held onto their Taoist ancestor worship when the government officially changed everybody to atheists.
Saw a tiny bit of Hanks on a NYE interview show on British TV (obviously recorded some time in advance). It was the usual celebrity interview nonsense, each question just a prompt for an anecdote. After one of these softballs, that he 1,000% knew was coming, he reacted so hard, he literally slapped his knee and then took his glasses off in mock surprise and anticipatory mirth. This is why he’s a great actor, I thought, to bother to try that much on such nonsense. I raised my glass to him once again. Really hope he’s not a damn paedo.
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What are these people like in real life? Like do they work with people who have no idea they’re insane? Do their families know? Someone needs to do a Qanon doc so I can watch it because it’s completely fascinating.
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QAnon’s insane just because somehow a weird 4/8chan thing jumped from obscurity into the laps of people who have probably never even heard of image boards. I knew that shit had grown beyond what its creator ever dreamed it could when my late 60s in-laws knew about it and were talking about how dumb it was.
I would also like a documentary showing just how bugfuck insane some of these people are.
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Early 2000s was fine. Mid 2010s and pretty much the entire 1980s was bad.
the home was unoccupied and they did it as a tribute to some guy that was retiring. In bad taste but not really as bad as people are making it out, IMO
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I lived in mainland China for a while. I speak Chinese but I’m also VERY white, so I’m sure I received a filtered experience, but my sense was: (a) that many Chinese folks maintain spiritual practices and beliefs
(B) organized religious entities were limited and relatively restricted. You might encounter small bible study groups, or Jews having a shabbat dinner, but large churches or synagogues weren’t that common. Similarly, you could find Halal restaurants even in cities without obvious mosques. Buddhist temples were officially treated as historic buildings without much religious context, but they would always be more crowded around “holy dates” so it was clear that many people maintained cultural links to the underlying religion.
Tl/dr: many people are spiritual, but the gov’t seems to try to keep a lid on the size and organization of religious actors b/c large actors would be a threat to gov’t authority.
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It’s 2020. The election will be this year. Shit’s gonna get really real really quick.
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I lived in China and can confirm this as true.
There is a conflict in ideology. China was a spiritual (mostly Buddhist) country prior to Mao but when Mao introduced his version of Marxism in China, it deemphasized religious belief and focused more on the belief in Maoism itself. With Xi now in power, he’s now trying to replace Maoism with his own ideology. It takes an even more aggressive approach against religion as he views them as authorities that can undermine his influence in the country.
As a matter of fact, many foreigners go over to China under the pretense of being English teachers when their real goal is growing and maintaining underground Christian churches in order to proselytize Chinese citizens. Doing so is actually illegal and while the missionary will likely just be deported, the Chinese citizen could face much harsher penalties whether social or legal.
When I was dating a fellow foreign girl, I was unaware that she was a missionary. Apparently, she trusted me enough to invite me to a meeting that she did not give many details about. When I did go, it was in a small apartment a short walk away. I saw many of my students there and the owner of a cafe I used to go to was going into a sermon about Jesus. It was packed and extremely hot. It felt one of those crazy super reverend freak shows compressed into an apartment rather than in a giant arena. I departed pretty quickly.
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Being in D.C. can be a bit tilt inducing for anybody closely aware of their country’s history.
Having a tour guide in The Capitol state that the painting ‘The Baptism of Pocahontas’ is supposed to symbolize cultural unity between Native Americans and Pilgrims when it was really cultural imperialism was truly infuriating. I think the tour guide added the bit about how Pocahontas’s family looked in the painting as a hint that it wasn’t. Makes me think he added that information himself, being aware that what he was told to say was complete bullshit but couldn’t give the real story in detail without risking getting fired.
While the guide pretty much knew bits and pieces about every person represented by a statue in the Capitol, he skipped over any information about Huey Long when he pointed out his statue. It was annoying because he’s a really fascinating figure and fought hard against unfettered capitalism and kowtowing to corporate figures through the Share Our Wealth program. These days, those policies would be shouted down as being communistic and would likely paint America in a bad light in the eyes of foreign tourists. It’s a shame that he was asssassinated before being able to fulfill his presidential aspirations in order to push that program forward. I thought pushing into the nuances of the SoW program would frustrate the 50+ people on the guided tour who had probably never heard of it. So, I passed on asking about him.
It makes me wonder what people in other countries think when they go through museums of their own history. Do they think that foreigners who visit them are being misled or aren’t hearing the full story? I wonder what they would add to a museum if they could do so.
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For those of us who can remember that was all a pale imitation of CBGB’s era Talking Heads, Television, Blondie etc. The Strokes were almost a facsimile of first two albums Television (and I liked The Strokes).
supposedly Soleimani just got killed in an airstrike… war time?
So true.
I think I’ve already mentioned this once or twice, but one band that has proven the test of time is Simple Minds (of “Don’t You (forget about me” fame).
Also Duran Duran continued putting out not just good but some of their best music well into the 00s. I’d argue more people know them for their 90s hits like “Ordinary World” than their 80s stuff.