china
China's on a mission to ban superstition, according to Reuters.
In a rare public forum, the head of China's State Administration of
Religious Affairs, Wang Zuoan, announced the government's official
position on religion: that it pretty much sucks.
And toss out those fortune cookies while you're at it. Zuoan told state-run newspaper, the Study Times:
For a ruling party which follows Marxism, we need to help people establish a correct world view and to scientifically deal with birth, ageing, sickness and death, as well as fortune and misfortune, via popularizing scientific knowledge.
Zuoan
ascribed China's rising fervor for the hip, new trend of religion to
China's economic boom, which made people want to search for something
reassuring amidst their newly complex lives.
China's
religious population is at least 100 million people, with Christians,
Muslims, Buddhists, and Daoists comprising the majorities. They're all
technically protected by their constitution, but rights groups note that
the country controls religion with an iron grip, says Reuters.
Earlier
this month, a Chinese lawyer said he was beaten up by 10 police officers
after being told he couldn't defend practitioners of Falun Gong, a
spiritual practice which officials call an "evil cult", Reuters reported.
Luckily (if
that word is still allowed), Zuoan acknowledged that he can't turn
China atheist in a single night. "Religion has been around for a very
long time, and if we rush to try to push for results and want to
immediately 'liberate' people from the influence of religion, then it
will have the opposite effect and push people in the opposite
direction," he said.
[Image via Shutterstock]
No comments:
Post a Comment