If Only The Romans

[Anomalocaris]

[quote='Pickup_shonuff' pid='829390' dateline='1419653242']
When last I checked we are in the midst of our own struggle to keep those same xtian fuckwits from turning our country into a mindless theocracy. If you are asking me if I resent the Chinese looking to prevent that sort of a cancer from spreading the answer would be 'no.' Religion is about earthly power....not 'beliefs.'

That's very noble and all, but you're simply promoting the installation of a different authoritarian power. And you're not doing so out any deep concern for human liberty, for the "members of a rural Christian congregation in eastern China welded pieces of metal into a cross and hoisted it onto the top of a worship hall," as in, they didn't harm anybody or try to suppress others' rights as you're suggesting theirs should be.

Chinese think a government's ultimate justification is the facilitation of improvement in the practical, demonstrable wellbeing of its citizens in that life which everyone can see as existent, such as economic prosperity, more life choices, freedom of preventable diseases, hungers and anticipatable natural disasters. Christianity Through its promotion of an emphasis on a bogus afterlife rather than effective improvement of this life, undermines the ability of the government to be judged by the criteria any government should be judged by, and is thereby destructive of beneficial central power.

Basically, they don't think the promotion of afterlife at the expense of this one "harms nobody". They think it indirectly but profoundly harms everybody.

You can say in the interest of freedom of conscience, we have been told it is meritorious to act dumb and not dwell on second and third order effects. They think they have seen second and third order effects too often to ignore them.