Audie
Veteran Member
The New Testament is already a more socialist text, unaltered, than any actual policies of the Chinese Communist Party:
Acts 4:32-35: "No one claimed private ownership of any possessions, but everything they owned was held in common. ... There was not a needy person among them...it was distributed to each as any had need."
Why would any 'socialist' need to edit that to make it cohere any better than it already does with socialism? The New Testament is basically one giant diatribe against the wealthy who exploit the poor and social outcasts i.e. "But ye have dishonored the poor man. Do not the rich oppress you, and themselves drag you before the judgment-seats?" (James 2:6).
If you can't make Christianity fit a socialist agenda, what religion could you?
Of course, the post-Deng Xiaoping ideology has long embraced state capitalism and mixed private-public property ownership, under the guise of this being just the "primary stage of socialism" looking forward to a classless, moneyless utopia that is always so infuriatingly out of reach (funny that), all the while the billionaire real estate moguls and the corrupt Politburo elites in the CPC get richer and richer under an ever more totalitarian regime.
“The fundamental end of the Communist party of China under Xi Jinping is all the more to control that society politically and economically,” an China expert writing to the Guardian argued earlier this year.
To create a true 'people's community', every social group - along with every individual - within society has to be brought within the purview of state control. The Uighur Muslims and the Christians offend the Party apparatchiks and ideologues by their very existence, as distinct religious or ethnic identities from the totalizing 'whole'. That's why the Uighurs are held right now under a police state and being transported like cattle into vast "re-education camps".
I can understand very well why they might want to "revise" or "airbrush" scriptural verses like the following from the Gospel of Luke:
[God] has scattered the proud in the thoughts of their hearts.Somebody might get ideas, so.......
He has brought down the powerful from their thrones,
and lifted up the lowly;
he has filled the hungry with good things,
and sent the rich away empty
(Luke 1:51-53)
Dont worry, they wont get the idea from you.
China has had so much civil war, so many
invasions, it should be understandable that
strong and unified comes before anything
else.
Prosperity is great of course.
The bible and koran are rightly seen as
alien works of fantasy and fanaticism.
No more real than star wars.
They are not easily gotten rid of but to
the extent that they can be turned tp constructive
purpose they can be more easily tolerated.
Meanwhile it would not hurt you guys,
would be an aid to comprehension if
you could try to conceive of Beijing
being other than pure evil, but in fact
having a legit pov. It has BTW provided the best
govt, the most freedom and prosperity
China has ever known.