[Author’s note: Here is one too long for Huffington Post’s comment section about the US State Department’s attack on China’s treatment of religions. Hopefully, you may be interested. Attached below is my comment. It is the religions under the same God that are breaking up the Middle East right now as noted in my yesterday’s comment on that article about the Russia’s UN vetoes, “The Costs of the Third Russian Veto at the Security Council,” by Raghida Dergham (7/27). You may have read it. Here again, it is these same religions that gave birth to the Western Culture attached here which well explains why the US State Department came up with the kind of report that China disdains, “China: Religion Report From U.S. State Department Biased, Ignorant.” Richard Low]
A Glance at Western Culture
Broadly speaking, human civilization consists of two closely interrelated components: Human Culture (Renwen) and Material Culture (Wuzhi Wenming).
While the former is created by the humans’ mind and/or heart, the latter developed by their five senses with the help of mind. Generally speaking, the East is dominated by the former, whereas the West almost totally by the latter – perhaps too much.
Yes, the imported Christianity has provided some spiritual culture to the West; unfortunately, so far it has been used only as a tool to keep its common people obedient or faithful and to cover up the hypocritical behavior of its upper class.
For instance, Jesus told his followers to love their enemies in his Sermon on the Mount (Mt 5:44). I am reasonably sure that the common folks would certainly try to follow it most of the time, but not necessarily so the upper or ruling class.
Thus, when led by their hypocritical ambitious leaders, more Christians were slaughtered by Christians than by the Roman pagans during the fight over the adoption of Trinitarianism, according to Edward Gibbon in his “The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire.”
Ditto in the case of the Thirty Years War brought about by religious and political conflicts; according to the section on church history in Henry Halley’s Pocket Bible Handbook, some 10 to 20 million Christians were killed by Christians.
Even in this nuclear age, while peddling democracy and human rights all over the Third World, the most segregated institution in the US is its Christian church.
In the U.S. the Time magazine in its 01/11/10 issue reported, “Surveys from 2007 show that fewer than 8% of American congregations have a significant racial mix.” What a shame!
Not being their own indigenous religion, the Westerners appear to be suffering an inferiority complex. How wonderful it would have been had Jesus been born a European!
They might not have killed one another so mercilessly and so soullessly, and they would have welcomed the African-Americans to join them in worshipping their own “white” Jesus in the same sanctuary.
Sadly and unfortunately, Jesus is not! So, the less educated naive common folks found John Wilson’s “Our Israelitish Origins”(1840) telling them that nearly all Northern Europeans including the German, French, Scandinavian and Swiss were the lost tribes of Israel.
Then, came Houston Stewart Chamberlain’s “The Foundation of the 19th Century” (1899) in which he declared, “whoever maintains that Christ was a Jew is either ignorant or dishonest.”
Furthermore, few years ago in my neighborhood library, I came across an article in the Biblical Archeology magazine or some name similar to that reported that a German Kaiser threw a huge party to welcome an archeologist returning from Jerusalem because he had just discovered archeological evidence showing that Judaism was non-existent.
It was such shameless hypocritical dream or whim that gave birth to the kind of Western culture which was well described by Nicccolo Machiavelli (1469-1527) in his book, “The Prince.”
In this work, such unedifying dirty game rules as sketched here were followed by nearly all Western European nations in dealing with one another: dog-eat-dog; the end justifies the means; keep pledge only so long as it suits your purpose to do so; lying, stealing, and murder are sins in the lives of the ordinary men, but they are necessary in the conduct of politics at home and abroad.
It is not surprising that it is this kind of culture that is dominating the world today – a bully world where “you do as I tell you to no matter what the cost, but do not do as I do.”
So, my lackeys and I can own thousands of nuclear warheads, but you cannot have even a few because yours will threaten world peace and security. What a joke! The Western leaders never look at themselves in the mirror nor do their media.
Such is the Western culture!
Richard Low, RdhLow@aol.com