this post was submitted on 06 Oct 2024
167 points (96.6% liked)
Not The Onion
12541 readers
408 users here now
Welcome
We're not The Onion! Not affiliated with them in any way! Not operated by them in any way! All the news here is real!
The Rules
Posts must be:
- Links to news stories from...
- ...credible sources, with...
- ...their original headlines, that...
- ...would make people who see the headline think, “That has got to be a story from The Onion, America’s Finest News Source.”
Comments must abide by the server rules for Lemmy.world and generally abstain from trollish, bigoted, or otherwise disruptive behavior that makes this community less fun for everyone.
And that’s basically it!
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
Apart from being highly amused? I don't think it will fully work. And it's not even just the forgiver part. It's the eternal afterlife in heaven part. Because if the choice is "obey Xi on Earth by no longer venerating Christ" or "spend an eternity in heaven," and I believed in all this stuff, I'd sure pick heaven and just worship in secret.
I will say that it does kind of stop people though... in the sense that eventually their beliefs get diluted into a sort of merging of belief systems. Judaism and Christianity themselves are examples of this, but more recent ones would be the various New World iindigenous groups that merge their Pre-Columbian religion with Christianity or Crypto-Jews in the Southwestern U.S., the result of Spanish Jews converting to Christianity to avoid expulsion from Spanish lands.
So maybe what will end up happening is a sort of new form of Chinese Christianity where Mao is venerated as a saint or a prophet, but Jesus will very unlikely be usurped from the top of the worship chain... but right now, they aren't actually offering anything in return for that veneration even close to what Jesus offers believers.
Well said; this is what I was driving at. I don’t always align with your perspective but it’s always interesting. Thanks!
Thanks for asking!
Saints offer prayers to God. If you've ever asked someone to pray for you then you have done the same thing that the Orthodox do when they venerate an icon. No one is replacing God with Saints. Saints are only Saints because of Christs work in their life.
Bit of a rubbish take. These pictures are appearing in the three-self protestant state churches or the government forcing the pictures in Catholic churches. Basically all they're actually doing is pushing Christians underground.
That's literally what I was talking about when I was talking about the Indigenous Americans and Crypto-Jews... so how is it a "rubbish take?"