166
Xi and Mao replace Jesus and Mary in Chinese churches
(www.telegraph.co.uk)
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
this post was submitted on 06 Oct 2024
166 points (96.6% liked)
Not The Onion
12071 readers
992 users here now
Welcome
We're not The Onion! Not affiliated with them in any way! Not operated by them in any way! All the news here is real!
The Rules
Posts must be:
- Links to news stories from...
- ...credible sources, with...
- ...their original headlines, that...
- ...would make people who see the headline think, “That has got to be a story from The Onion, America’s Finest News Source.”
Comments must abide by the server rules for Lemmy.world and generally abstain from trollish, bigoted, or otherwise disruptive behavior that makes this community less fun for everyone.
And that’s basically it!
founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
In the Torah and Old Testament this is exactly why God forbade having idols, those can be replaced. Changing pictures of Jesus and Mary is for the Catholic Churches since Protestants don’t use idols. Protestant and Catholic Churches are to remove crosses (“for safety reasons”). These churches will just replace those images with something else (maybe the Ichthus <>< or IHS/Chi-Rho ☧) to represent a meeting place, there are many Christians symbols to choose from, and new ones will be made as necessary.
This has happened in the past in other areas and it never stops them. The message of an outside forgiver who is immortal and died so that they can be forgiven is too strong to quash. Of course the Chinese government takes issue with that. It takes power away from them. I’m surprised it didn’t happen sooner. Maybe Xi is coming to gripes with his own mortality as he ages and is trying to solidify his/his party’s rule?
@FlyingSquid@lemmy.world what’s your take on this?
Pictures of Jesus and Mary aren't (supposed to be) idols
Idol: an image or representation of a god used as an object of worship.
I agree that they probably weren’t intended to be idols, but pictures of Jesus, Mary, the cross, etc are just objects of worship.
Jesus’s message of universal love goes beyond the Christian religion, which feels like it only exists to promote itself instead of the values that Christ promoted.
If Jesus were alive today I doubt he would care about the destruction of religious symbols. He’d probably say something like “Why are you concerned with a symbol when you have brothers and sisters who need help? If you really want to exalt God, go out and do His work.”
Like, if people truly believe God is the alpha and omega do they really think they need to get offended on his behalf?
Christianity has done a great job of putting God in a tiny box called “religion” and taking away all his power to the point where dinosaurs, evolution, and science are able to shake their faith.
God/love/the universe is nonsense, and we get to spend our whole lives trying to figure that nonsense out.
https://youtu.be/SzXn4PozUTo?si=h2-x0YJHqZzmuG7n
veneration doesn't mean worship. there's a huge difference. Idol worshippers believe the statues / picture / whatever is some kind of living god. Orthodox or catholics who venerate icons of Christ or the Theotokos (Mother of God) or other saints are not worshipping them. They are venerating / showing respect to the icon that is representing the saint who is alive in Christ or God.
Bingo