Is anybody in (or near) Shanghai? Or does anybody speak Chinese?
Offline With the World Expo on hand, things have gone too far.*
There seem to be more theists than ever at "English corner"** preaching to the Chinese and taking advantage of the situation to earn god-points.
If anybody isn't familiar with the situation:
Chinese aren't as inoculated to the bullshit we hear on a regular basis- they haven't heard very many dissenting view points, and they're very trusting.
When somebody comes in preaching heaven, hell, and salvation from Jesus, it's relatively easy to terrorize these poor people (most of whom at English corner are naive high school and university students just wanting to practice their English) into being born again Christians. There's also the sense that the Westerners are rich, and therefore intelligent, and therefore authorities on such matters (and so these proselytizers are getting a huge advantage there)- they appeal to the overwhelming number of Christians in the states, and don't understand how all of those smart (and rich) people can be wrong. See Hong Kong or South Korea for good examples of where this sentiment has led.
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I hate seeing this happen, and I'm tired of sitting around on Sundays- Screw video games and bootleg DVDs (or... at least relegate them to Saturday activities)!
It's time to get out there and start making some difference as a dissenting view in all of this mess (since Chinese generally won't argue with these new Christians to set them straight, being too interested in avoiding conflict)- seriously, virtually nobody is opposing this out here at all! All it would take is a second opinion to set things straight and let them make an even remotely informed choice.
I don't want Mainland China to turn into a cesspool of mindless dogmatic insanity and self-congratulation like South Korea (and somewhat, Hong Kong).
The extent to which these vultures are taking advantage of these student's ignorance is inexcusable; I want to start pushing back. It's time to hand out subtitled DVDs, pamphlets, and have discussion groups on the doorsteps of these [rare but growing] churches (of course, will need to clear this with the police first).
Is anybody in or near Shanghai? Hell, does anybody speak Chinese even, and might you be willing to help with some pamphlets (My spoken Chinese is abysmal- and I can't write it at all)- or even if you aren't near and don't speak any, in compiling and mixing video? I know if I try to do it myself, I just won't have time and this effort will lose steam after I put together one half-done flier.
I'm willing to invest a couple hundred bucks a month into printing DVDs and pamphlets, and hiring leafleters- but I don't know if I can go it completely alone (although I am used to arguing four or five on one- lack of Chinese speaking could be a problem for me). Would even be nice have a bit of moral support out there in the hot zone...
* Personal context [aka why I'm willing to get off my ass and spend money]: Some Christian couple converted a friend of mine, and starting dumping in a bunch of dogma. The conversion has been reversed (thank reason), but apparently they've gotten to a bunch of them, and that's just *one* couple.
** English corner is a kind of usually unofficial location where Chinese gather, in various places in cities across China, to practice their oral English together- Native English speaking teachers are often required to attend for a short time each week by the schools, and foreigners frequently pass through (many to preach, some just for amusement).
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Really? Nobody in China?
I guess not that surprising... there's generally a lack of motivation for anything that isn't school, work, or family events.
I might need to invite some Chinese friends here- see if I can't inspire a few people to be more active.
How can one really convey to a person who hasn't grown up in the West the problems inherent in religious dogma?
I showed one friend Jesus camp, but I'm not sure if it got through much. I really need something with Chinese subtitles.
They seem to think it's not a threat, because 'there's no way somebody who wasn't completely stupid would ever believe that stuff', so it couldn't spread in China (and yet it obviously is spreading). How does one convey this? Is there a better video out there I should reference?
My spoken mandarin is only fair, and I can't read or write.... I don't know what I could do to help.
Our revels now are ended. These our actors, | As I foretold you, were all spirits, and | Are melted into air, into thin air; | And, like the baseless fabric of this vision, | The cloud-capped towers, the gorgeous palaces, | The solemn temples, the great globe itself, - Yea, all which it inherit, shall dissolve, | And, like this insubstantial pageant faded, | Leave not a rack behind. We are such stuff | As dreams are made on, and our little life | Is rounded with a sleep. - Shakespeare
How about a video monologue about how religion sucks? Kind of like the blasphemy challenge, but in Chinese?
Actually, maybe that's a good campaign to start here. I could ask people to upload to youku instead of youtube (given the blockage).
I think that only really worked with RRS community support, though- since the videos were posted along with this site, or in some channel, right? I didn't follow it very well, but I vaguely remember something like that.
If I can find a friend to translate the page, I wonder if we could make another page, but in Chinese with youku embeds instead?
AKA politically incorrect Disneyisms
@Blake: Yuck. There might be things I'd change about Chinese culture, but their lack of religion is not one of them. I *like* the way Chinese people are now (in general), and I don't see how they coudl benefit from Jesus. The whole thing makes me ill.
Good luck.
Everything makes more sense now that I've stopped believing.
Thanks Mellestad; the idea of Christianity proliferating in China makes me uneasy too- pretty much the last great rational frontier (short of a little crazy Chinese traditional medicine; but people are much less invested in that than religion).
To RRS: Does anybody have an archive of all of those youtube videos of people blaspheming the holy spirit? If so, anybody willing to mail me a DVD of them (I'll cover postage)?
I'd like to subtitle some of the best ones and pop them on a compilation with some other subtitled videos to hand out.
Worst case, I should be able to pay somebody to sub all of that in Chinese for me here (just not sure what kind of quality I'd get out of it; there's quite a bit of tricky cultural context there).
It sucks, but I don't think Christianity will have much problems spreading in China. From my experiences, people in China are simply irreligious by birth and are not at all immune to lies and BS. A lot of the medicine is weird, but what really bothers me is their complacency towards the government. It would be at least understandable if they simply stayed quiet because they were afraid of the government; my own grandfather was sent to "re-education" camp (room 101?) in the 1970s (I think it was the 70s). However, many of my relatives exercise a sort of double-think where they profess to adore the government, but are afraid of it at the same time.
As a matter of fact, when I was little, everyone taught me that the Communist Party were the 'good guys' that fought and protected China from the Japanese while the Nationalists were the ones that betrayed our homeland and ran away to Taiwan with their tails between their legs. Heh, can you say, redacting history?
Chinese people have a lot of respect for Americans, even glorifying the West, to an extent. We call America "mei guo," which literally means "beautiful country." If, while some Christian was trying to convert them, every Chinese person knew that most of the smartest Westerners were NOT religious, that would be sufficient to prevent a lot of people from being converted. It's an appeal to popularity and authority though, so I don't if we should stoop to such a level, but I can't help but think that it'll work better than any logically sound argument.
Our revels now are ended. These our actors, | As I foretold you, were all spirits, and | Are melted into air, into thin air; | And, like the baseless fabric of this vision, | The cloud-capped towers, the gorgeous palaces, | The solemn temples, the great globe itself, - Yea, all which it inherit, shall dissolve, | And, like this insubstantial pageant faded, | Leave not a rack behind. We are such stuff | As dreams are made on, and our little life | Is rounded with a sleep. - Shakespeare
Well Blake, You might want to check with normal bob smith. He has some tract that you can hand out. I also know that he lives like a few subway stops from two versions of china town. I would bet that the people there would be willing to translate his material and send it in graphic form.
I have another idea as well. However, I must first ask if you like anagrams?
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Yep, that's precisely my concern; having lived in China for a couple years, I've only found more and more to suggest it has the potential to spread like wildfire.
I can understand that a bit more; China is a developing nation, and we've learned from our own two party systems in the West that it's almost impossible to get things done when government is checking itself like that.
I suspect that after China's infrastructure is more full developed, and the majority of her citizens enjoy first world living conditions, that the party itself will probably fall apart into liberal and conservative camps (once there are more trivial things to argue about, as opposed to building roads and getting people water and food).
I will actually be very surprised if that doesn't happen; and when power is deconcentrated, the control the party has over the process will be too, and the republic will be more directly representational.
Maybe that's wishful thinking, but I really can't imagine a scenario where that wouldn't happen once the party is done with its primary objectives (food, water, housing, education- being things people overwhelmingly demand anyway).
Didn't the CCP mostly rise up and kick the nationalists out after the Japanese threat was repelled by all Chinese and some Western powers working together?
Yes, I get that logic quite a bit.
America = right.
America = Christian.
Therefore: Christian = right.
I'm not sure if that has very much to do with it- France is "law land" after all
I've heard from some people, who as kids who thought it was literal, but a bunch of countries have silly names if you say them literally (and usually positive names, given Chinese tendency to compliment).
I've used that one; I've also appealed to classism.
Chinese city people understand the concept of "country people" pretty well. I explain that the majority of people in the U.S. are similar to China, and most are poorly educated country people. Most of those people are Christians- that religion is mostly a thing for uneducated 'country people'.
I have to explain that because the U.S.A. is mostly democratic, the president has to say he's also religious, or the country people won't vote for him, so he can't win these days (and that long ago, the founding fathers were largely not Christian, and many early presidents were not either). But most educated people are not religious- listing some examples (like Einstein, even Lincoln) helps too.
After that, they don't want to take after the country people very much.
Sadly, it does. Their belief that it was right didn't come from sound logic, so this really only defeats the poor logic they were using to begin with, I think, by showing them what they're really emulating.
I like to add to that some other arguments, though.
Usually I try to go into the unpleasant dark-age laws in the Bible, explain that what it says isn't good to follow (the laws that tell people to kill their family members, and Yeshua's demand that people hate their fathers and mothers to be his disciples seem useful to this end), explain that there's no real evidence for any of it, and that most of Christianity is based purely on stories that were made up.
Then I can explain that Science and religion are completely at odds, and that religious people almost all reject science (easy to give examples). To drive the point home, I compare what science has given us (modern living standards, health care, technology), and what religion has (war, hate, iconoclasty, anti-education).
I can prove that god is illogical, but it's very difficult to explain the concepts of supernatural, omniscience, free-will, omnipotence, omnibenevolence, moral subjectivity, etc. I've found this falls flat- possibly because I don't know how to translate any of those concepts. Maybe because people are generally not smart enough to understand the logical disproofs without more thinking than they're willing to do.
It seems like the logical proofs against god arguments work better in the West. Proof by consequence, or appeal to authority work better here, despite those not being good proofs.
That would be cool. Is he on this site?
'Heaven is Awesome' would probably be a good one to hand out at a church as people are entering Sunday morning. Maybe 'God is Fake', but it's missing so much background, it might not make any sense in this context.
It could be tricky to get the sarcasm to come across right.
Hesitantly: I suppose. What did you have in mind?
Yah, normalbob has a blog account here. I don't know if that is the best way to get to him though.
As far as the other, what about if you went for a cultural context type of thing? You know, compare christianity to something else that your audience would know (and will make your flaky internet go nuts if I dare to speak it's name)? Something along the lines of:
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I imagine he'd have to skim this thread to know what I was talking about. Anyway, I'll try to convince a friend to help me translate that one (or re-write it entirely- I could add in a bit more context; it's the idea that's good).
I can snag some renaissance paintings or something for the art, for copyright reasons so I'm not taking any copyrighted work from him. Since his web page is not in Chinese, there's no real way to credit him for it, so I should probably completely redo it with a similar idea.
I think comparing to the particularly dangerous Falun Gong cult is definitely useful for individuals (I have made that comparison)- in particular, I'd really love to get in touch with whatever government branch is responsible for dealing with cults and see what could be done about this.
Some countries have laws against religious proselytism, if not against the belief, and that seems more than reasonable to me. If only I had the resources to really organize rallies (and protests against the church) to get laws like that passed here.
There's some paperwork that needs to be done with the police to have demonstrations like that, but I don't imagine it would be too difficult to get the O.K. for it, drawing that parallel.
I'll have to look into organizing a rally/protest or something. Find some good Mao and Marx quotes against religion, among other intellectuals, plaster them up on a bunch of signs, go out and hand out fliers, and invite people to join in.
It's a possibility. I don't know how reliable it is, but according to wiki (lol), there are already two factions within the Communist Party. Although both factions support the CCP and their roles are "largely complementary," I think the fact that there are two factions at all makes a dissension essentially inevitable eventually.
Pretty much.
The CCP and the Nationalists temporarily formed an alliance during WWII because of Japan. The CCP didn't defeat the Nationalists in a Civil War and come to power until 1949. But...since the CCP are the ones that won, they're the ones that get to rewrite history I guess.
Heh, of course, China itself has the best name. "Zhong guo." It's the center of the world.
Lol, brilliant.
Here's something that I think might work well, if you haven't used it yet. Sometimes, when we're debating with Christians, we discuss what will happen to people who have never heard of Christianity. Since you are dealing with people who are actually unfamiliar with Christianity, I think this route would be particularly effective. Furthermore, it is actually a good argument.
Christians don't have any good responses to it. If the non-believers would go to heaven, then why are the Christians there? If the non-believers would go to hell, then point out the injustice of the situation. If non-believers get another chance in the afterlife to choose, then again, why are the Christians there?
In that situation, it might also work really well to try the "not by their works but by God's grace" are they saved. Even, "Mao might have been a really awesome guy, but he's going to hell because he wasn't a Christian." Einstein is doomed, but Hitler is saved if he repents before he dies.
Our revels now are ended. These our actors, | As I foretold you, were all spirits, and | Are melted into air, into thin air; | And, like the baseless fabric of this vision, | The cloud-capped towers, the gorgeous palaces, | The solemn temples, the great globe itself, - Yea, all which it inherit, shall dissolve, | And, like this insubstantial pageant faded, | Leave not a rack behind. We are such stuff | As dreams are made on, and our little life | Is rounded with a sleep. - Shakespeare
That is the Catholic response, anyway. Not really a good one, they don't really have any good responses to anything, but they think it is. Protestants are more likely to go with what it says in the bible (that everybody else goes to hell) or ignore it entirely.
That is, for Catholics and many other orthodox Christian faiths, their god will be pissed if they don't preach the gospel- and they don't believe that preaching it could damn anybody who wouldn't have been damned anyway. See:
This isn't for atheists, but only for people who devoutly attempt to do the will of 'god'- who believe in this 'god' and are doing their best to seek him. Those who are not definitely go to hell by all canonical Catholic accounts.
This doesn't apply to very many people at all who are not devoutly religious in some way (It applies to the old prophets, and possibly some devout people of other religions who have not heard the gospel), possibly unless they are infants (in which case they may have been "seeking" but did the best they could without any time).
So, spreading the gospel to atheists wouldn't seem to be a risk to them.
AND keep in mind, in their view if anybody was sincerely seeking their god, any revelation of the gospel would be received rather than rejected.
So, it's a win-win situation: they're so delusional they they ad-hoc any "accidental damnation" in such a way that the person would have been damned anyway because said person was not sincerely seeking. Unless the gospel was poorly presented, in which case it doesn't count.
For them, it's logically impossible to damn somebody by telling them the gospel- but they could save somebody by doing it.
He did marry his girlfriend the day before they killed themselves (which was planned in advance); seems like they were squaring everything away with their god. So, while we aren't sure what he did in his room in his last moments, this is overwhelmingly probable (to the extent that it would be kind of stupid to assume anything else).
Definitely, all good things to say. Just a trick of saying them in Chinese.
Do you know how to write in pinyin?
Yes, pin yin is actually phonetic (is that the right word?), so if I can speak it, I can write it (Which reminds me that languages where sounds in the spoken language don't correspond to the written language, like Mandarin, are illogical. If this was the case, I would be able to write in Mandarin. As it is, I would have to memorize the thousands of characters. God, I hate that language.)
But....I don't think I would be able to write this kind of stuff in pin yin. I mean, my Mandarin seriously sucks. I can engage in basic conversation in Mandarin, but something like a religious debate......I wouldn't be able do it unless I spend a ****load of time studying and translating or I got help from someone who was more familiar with the language.
So maybe the best way would just be to write it in English, then translate it into Mandarin.
Our revels now are ended. These our actors, | As I foretold you, were all spirits, and | Are melted into air, into thin air; | And, like the baseless fabric of this vision, | The cloud-capped towers, the gorgeous palaces, | The solemn temples, the great globe itself, - Yea, all which it inherit, shall dissolve, | And, like this insubstantial pageant faded, | Leave not a rack behind. We are such stuff | As dreams are made on, and our little life | Is rounded with a sleep. - Shakespeare
Yeah, but it depends on which dialect you grew up knowing; if you knew Cantonese, or something, it wouldn't correspond.
Also, it can be pretty difficult to work backwards from the pronunciation unless you're used to doing it- some Chinese can only read pinyin if they do so out-loud several times to figure out which word it is; the same typically corresponds to writing when I ask somebody how to "spell it" in pinyin. Half of the time they have to try a couple times. Sometimes I can get the right spelling from the sound faster than they can, which I find odd.
Maybe; in order to do that I'll have to teach somebody all of the context, though, I think.
Well, he does make the stuff available on his web site as free PDF files. Heck but I carry a few of the of the “Can I be forgiven” ones to hand to the people who want me to read their garbage. Of course, since we know that hell is not real, it has no consequence but I find some humor value every time I hand out one of them.
OTOH, if you want to make new stuff (which is probably specific to your situation) then I would say that imitation is the sincerest form of flattery. Heck but he might even like it if you sent him copies of whatever you come up with.
As far as the other idea, I remember reading a paper from some computer science journal a year or so ago that reported on testing you magical internet daddy. From that, I was given to understand that the FG term caused it to fire RST packets in both directions when it came up in the filter list.
I guess that either it is no longer true or it is intermittent in nature.
In any case, my understanding of what you are dealing with is necessarily imperfect. However, I am given to understand that there is a large emphasis on science over there. To the extent that that is true, perhaps you can hit on the idea of some of Christianities greatest hits.
Stuff that comes to mind would be the usual YEC crap. If you tell people that this is potentially what they are buying into, then you can hit them with the age of the Earth being less than the extent of known Chinese culture and the flood being something that nobody in China noticed.
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Right. So, it's good that I know Mandarin. I don't know a single word of Cantonese.
I'm fine with pin yin. The only problem would be that my spoken Mandarin sucks too......it's a big problem. And, with this kind of discussion, I'm unfamiliar with a ton of the language. Jesus, I've never heard anyone talk about this kind of stuff in Mandarin.
How do the Christians proselytize? Do they hand out pamphlets written in Chinese?
Our revels now are ended. These our actors, | As I foretold you, were all spirits, and | Are melted into air, into thin air; | And, like the baseless fabric of this vision, | The cloud-capped towers, the gorgeous palaces, | The solemn temples, the great globe itself, - Yea, all which it inherit, shall dissolve, | And, like this insubstantial pageant faded, | Leave not a rack behind. We are such stuff | As dreams are made on, and our little life | Is rounded with a sleep. - Shakespeare
Wow, I didn't think I'd know more Cantonese than you do (I do know one word). Mandarin is definitely the dialect to know.
I think it's mostly foreigners proselytizing, and it spreading from person to person (people who know each other, by conversation). Chinese aren't as likely to proselytize to strangers.