I went to Vietnam a couple times. If you hang out downtown in the city, you might get a random Jehovah's Witness or Seventh Day Adventist* try to chat you up. "Oh, we can't do missionary work out in the open, so we just do one-on-one conversations like this". Despite the lack of "Jesus saves, die sinner" signs in Hanoi, you can definitely find Catholic and Protestant churches in Vietnam.

The Western press likes to piss and moan about settler nation missionaries that go, without proper visas mind you, to spread their Western versions of Christianity to the DPRK, only to get deported. So am I allowed to enter a white people country without a visa to stir up trouble and expect no consequences???

I'm the furthest thing from an expert on Myanmar. I get everything I know from Burmese friends. But if you look into the minority people situation, many of them are being heavily proselytised by the worst of the Amerikan type. I don't want the Pat Robertson's the world anywhere near struggling people.

*I'm definitely not saying that JWs and SDAs are anywhere near the worst as Christian sects go.

  • Thallo [love/loves]
    ·
    3 个月前

    That's a pretty cold take, let me heat it up for you:

    AES states should just outright ban Western religions. A Western country has a revolution? Yup, they ban their own religion.

    • Łumało [he/him]@lemmygrad.ml
      ·
      3 个月前

      I'm aggressively anti-Catholic and anti-Christian and I 100% agree with this statement.

      Death to Christianity. The church is the biggest mafia of Poland, and this suck religion has caused untold amounts of harm.

      inb4 "you are a reactionary bad take haver, religion can sometimes be good actually"

      I don't even fucking care no more, not after what the fuckers have done since 1989.

      Alternatives to the bullshit shall be setup, every church (10357 of them) shall either be demolished or turned into museums.

      Christians will be persecuted as bad as they think they were during PRL, Popiełuszko's death will look like a fucking tea party.

      Infinite genocide on the first world and every kkkrackkker defending it's bullshit.

      Rant overino :3333

    • ClimateChangeAnxiety [he/him, they/them]
      ·
      3 个月前

      Genuinely I believe Christianity is a scourge that must be eradicated. Many of its core beliefs (especially Catholicism and evangelical branches) are fundamentally at odds with building a good, healthy society that tries to improve life for all.

      “Suffering is good for the soul” is too deeply ingrained, and it’s a belief that prevents doing literally anything good.

    • GarbageShoot [he/him]
      ·
      3 个月前

      Credit where it is due, you did as advertised. That said, I think it is basically idealist to just ban western religions like they represent a significantly greater problem to the task of building communism than Eastern religions. There are some specific religions that need to be struggled against (the first step is probably not banning them), most notably Catholicism for its centralized organization around the reactionary institution of the Vatican, but it's pure orientalism to think that whatever blase protestantism is really more of a threat to Vietnamese communism than Buddhism is.

      • Thallo [love/loves]
        ·
        3 个月前

        Ah, I get it.

        They should ban all earth-based religions and only allow ones that are introduced from space.

        • GarbageShoot [he/him]
          ·
          3 个月前

          What I mean is that priority of aggression should clearly be given to the religions that wield or practically threaten to wield political power, like the Catholic or Orthodox churches, the evangelical bloc in America, and indeed many Eastern religious entities like, uh, Vajrayana Buddhism in Bhutan, for example, or the Tibetan church of old, before the PLA liberated Tibet. Unfortunately I think this puts Theravada on the chopping block since it has great clerical emphasis, but that's just how it is. Reform Jews, miscellaneous protestants, the more decentralized branches of Mahayana, and other such religions are fine, we don't need to gulag Shintoists unless they're the Imperial kind.

          But if you take my view as too liberal, then you may as well go banning space religions while you're at it.

          • Thallo [love/loves]
            ·
            3 个月前

            But if you take my view as too liberal, then you may as well go banning space religions while you're at it.

            curry-space

            spoiler

            Sorry, I have to say this because you're being so earnest in your responses, but I'm just trolling. I thought it was a completly absurd statement that nobody would take seriously... But a bunch of people ended up agreeing with me, so... emilie-shrug

            • GarbageShoot [he/him]
              ·
              3 个月前

              heart-sickle

              I think this board suffers pretty severely from orientalism, so it's not that surprising. The fact that I struggled to condemn a specific Buddhism beyond the state religion of Bhutan is probably some evidence that I, too, orientalize a fair bit. My point is that, however joking you were, people are going to agree with it, so it deserves to be refuted to the extent that I'm able to refute it.

              • doublepepperoni [none/use name]
                ·
                3 个月前

                I'm not sure if it's necessarily just Orientalism. Most posters here tend to be Western, white and have probably had some kind of Christianity-adjacent upbringing so they're understandably wary about going off about non-Western religions they're not that familiar with. I don't think many people here would be comfortable declaring that we need to abolish Islam and Judaism either. They just don't want to come across like a Western chauvinist

          • doublepepperoni [none/use name]
            ·
            3 个月前

            I don't think it's necessary to ban religion outright, but religious institutions need to be completely defanged and decoupled from the levers of power. I think we can keep the more historically and culturally significant traditions around as quaint cultural practices as long as they behave

            • GarbageShoot [he/him]
              ·
              3 个月前

              My bad. As you can see, it's at the edge of my ken, I've only ever known Jewish people who are so secular that they aren't even in a sect anymore.

              • TheDeed [he/him, comrade/them]
                ·
                3 个月前

                It's all good, even the Judaism subreddit (don't go there, it's ass) had a bot that would automatically make this correction when posted, its a common one even for people that are religious/deep in the sects

      • AssortedBiscuits [they/them]
        ·
        3 个月前

        I think Protestantism is a greater threat than Buddhism in Vietnam because that Protestantism is just a means for the West (and more specifically the US because let's face it the majority of evangelicals are USians) to worm their way (back) into Vietnamese society while Buddhism is just part of traditional Vietnamese society. And as we saw with the self-immolation of Thich Quang Duc, Buddhism has played a progressive role in Vietnamese society before while Christianity in the form of Catholicism has always played a reactionary role in Vietnamese society. Of course, the fact that Buddhism is a part of traditional Vietnamese society doesn't give it a pass and there will be reactionary branches and schools that must be crushed.