Asia Times Online :: China News - Christianity finds a...
Rated • 3 reviews • religion • atimes.com
in AsiaTimes by Spengler Ten thousand Chinese become Christians each day, according to a stunning report by the National Catholic Reporter's veteran correspondent John Allen, and 200 million Chinese may comprise the world's largest concentration of Christians by mid-century, and the largest missionary force in history.
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Now the great migrations throw into the urban melting pot a half-dozen language groups who once lived isolated from one another. Not for more than a thousand years have so many people in the same place had such good reason to view as ephemeral all that they long considered to be fixed, and to ask themselves: "What is the purpose of my life?"
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People do not live in a spiritual vacuum; where a spiritual vacuum exists, as in western Europe and the former Soviet Empire, people simply die, or fail to breed. In the traditional world, people see themselves as part of nature, unchangeable and constant, and worship their surroundings, their ancestors and themselves. When war or economics tear people away from their roots in traditional life, what once appeared constant now is shown to be ephemeral. Christianity is the great liquidator of traditional society, calling individuals out of their tribes and nations to join the ekklesia, which transcends race and nation.
Christianity replaced that animistic body of knowledge with a simplistic foundational story that the West still largely lives off today. In short:
- History as a straight progressive line with a beginning and an end:
* The beginning of the story of human reality is presented as having been unleashed by a "first mover" called god.
* The end of that story is a promize to the "good people" that they will join god in eternal happiness while the bad ones shall be suffering for eternity. (in the meantime you better behave and practice the teachings of the creed!)
- Reality presented as a cauldron of dualism:
* everything is seen as being on the side of, or good, or bad
* this unleashes a perpetual fight between good and bad
* and humanity is thus being extracted out of its organic life to fight for the good.
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