China confiscates Bibles

They exceeded the Bible limit. You can only have 300, and they had 315. China no see Bible of yours!

Christians'll eat this shit up. Nothing is more energizing to them then being persecuted.

I'm sure there's an episode of the West Wing about this but I can't remember which season so I can't help.

~~who cares~~

Then they came for the movie critics, and I said nothing.

[liberal-media]Well, this looks like good news for John McCain.[/liberal-media]

China's doing a lot worse than taking away Bibles. But it's not to Christians, so Cap don't care.

While the People's Republic of China has eased its restrictions on religion since the 1970s, it still sees participation in religion as being incompatible with full participation in the Communist Party (oddly, it withholds this judgment on religions such as Taoism and Buddhism and currently views both of them as being integral to Chinese culture) and will not allow people affiliated with religion to hold membership in the party. Membership in the party, by the by, is required for most forms of social advancement in China.

However, the Republic does offer protection to some religions in China, including Catholicism and Protestantism. The rub to this is they only offer this protection to state churches and only Bibles printed by the state are allowed in China and they are only allowed for use in services in state Churches and other state-sanctioned activities. Thus, they frown upon the introduction of independently published and distributed Bibles in the country.

~~takes a shot~~

Yes, the PRC still views most religions as leftovers from feudalism and colonialism and--given they are a Communist state--they view an absolute allegiance to anything other than the State as a threat. In their worldview, the State should be placed above all priorities and concerns, which is why they allow religious observance in state churches and only state churches: if you have to go through the State to gain access to the Church, then the State becomes the gateway to God and the most important temporal authority.



As for the "official" Bibles, is there anything in them that they've deleted or added that they feel they need to control the translations? I couldn't really imagine how their version would be really different.[/QUOTE] Unfortunately, the Vatican's struggles with the PRC have been more political in nature than religious or ethical. They're willing to play by the party's rules but currently the religious affairs of the Chinese Catholics aren't controlled by the Holy See, they're controlled by the PRC. The PRC appoints clergy and all the holders of Church offices in China. The Vatican's main concern is to place the Pope as the head of this process.

As for the Bible, I've never read a PRC sanctioned copy of the Bible, so I can't say how it differs from Bibles you'd find in Chinese communities elsewhere. However, given the history of other state controlled churches, it is a safe bet that what you find in them is fair more forgiving of and partial to the PRC than the other versions would be.

The issue is entirely one of control. Change = threat to control. What's so hard to understand or at all new about this?

They censor everything (internet, television, newspapers) and they send people who they think could be creating anything resembling a movement to challenge them to forced labor camps. This is not some new thing and it certainly isn't escalated by confiscating a bible.

ETA: as far as I understand it, the biggest issue with the Chinese Catholic Church is that they aren't allowed to recognize the pope as the highest authority on earth (since that would place it above the Chinese government). The religion basically the same in all other ways. Obviously for Roman Catholics that might be an important difference.

China is not a fan of the Muslims. They're always screwing over the Muslims and calling them terrorists (and the US was totally cool with that after 9/11). A lot of the anti-Muslim discrimination is centered around racism though so it can be hard to separate the two (Islam is practiced much more in the western areas of China but there are Muslim areas in most Chinese cities).

ETA: For a bit more info, just do some Google searching on 'uyghur'.

I'm not Catholic (obviously), but I guess the point was that the Chinese government feels that in traditional Catholicism the Pope is could be a higher authority in your life than the government--a sentiment they disagree with. Most of it is probably centered around a fear that someday the Pope could say, "Hey all you Catholic Chinese people, you should overthrow your government!" Obviously not a very likely scenario but the government in China hasn't remained in power thus far by NOT overreacting to everything.

ETA: China is also strange because while they couch much of what they say in Communist rhetoric, it's not really practiced at all anymore. It's just what the government uses for control. This is different than when Mao was in power and he actually BELIEVED all of the Communist stuff he said (and the government did stupid crap to try to convince him that it was true so he wouldn't send them to prison. See The Great Leap Forward which resulted in the death of 20-40 million Chinese from famine).

I love that they called it The Great Leap Forward, and then there's the Cultural Revolution...I wish more despots were creative.

That's exactly what it is, Cap. When you take away religion, something has to fill that void, and for Maoist China and even moreso Stalinist Russia, that something was the state and the cult of personality of the leader. It, like most other aspects of Soviet-Sino Communism, had only superficial similarities to anything Karl Marx ever wrote.