Un-Chinese communists make new demands that indigenous Taoists Sinicize

If the Chinese communists were really serious about Sinicization, they would be promoting, not attacking, the indigenous Chinese traditions of Confucius, Lao Tzu, Chuang Tzu, and Han era Buddhism. Instead they impose the foreign thought of Marx. What they are really interested in is power. The communists cynically manipulate belief in the old Confucian ideal of the harmonious society as their chief justification for the measures they take to eliminate competition for their on-going control of Chinese society.  

China's religious crackdown takes aim at Daoists, Buddhists:

Homegrown faiths not getting a 'free pass' by President Xi Jinping as Party fires salvo at over-commercialization of Daoism

It's not only Christianity and Islam the ruling Communist Party of China (CPC) is cracking down on and asserting its control over; homegrown religions like Daoism and imported belief systems like Buddhism now face more measures aimed at curbing and rolling back their commercialization. ... 

Many of China's most popular tourist attractions revolve around centuries-old Buddhist and Daoist temples. For example, the 1,500-year-old Shaolin temple in central Henan Province has long been under the scrutiny of authorities. ...

All commercial investments in Buddhism and Daoism are prohibited under the new directive, while any temples deemed non-profit are banned from investing in the operations of other religious venues, according to a recent report in the South China Morning Post. ...

During the (1966-76) Cultural Revolution, Buddhists were forced to practice their faith in secret while the less formal rites associated with Daoism took a pummeling under Chairman Mao Zedong, who died in 1976. The temples and statues of both religions were routinely shut down and destroyed. In recent decades, as religious practice has experienced a remarkable revival in China, both Buddhism and Daoism have crept and then surged back into favor. By some estimates, their combined active adherents now number well into the hundred of millions.

Rod Dreher And David Bentley Hart Finally Say Something Wholly Agreeable And Right

Here:

"If you don’t believe there is any cosmic order undergirding the visible world, and if you don’t believe that you are obliged to harmonize your own behavior with that unseen order (the Tao, you might say), then why should you bind yourself to moral precepts you find disagreeable or uncongenial? The most human act could be not to yield to nature, but to defy nature. Why shouldn’t you? Or, to look at it another way, why should we consider our own individual desires unnatural? Does the man who sexually and emotionally desires union with another man defying [sic] nature? Well, says Hart, it depends on what you consider nature to be."

In the final analysis the struggle for conservatism in America is the struggle for America, the struggle for the priority of what Russell Kirk called the permanent things, for what Plato called the ideas, for what Moses called the words written by the finger of God on the holy mountain, for what Paul claimed was written on every Gentile heart, perhaps even for what the Confucians called the mandate of heaven, and surely for what George Washington called an indispensable support: the religion and morality we all once shared, "with slight shades of difference" he said.

It is fundamentally the struggle for the priority of a transcendent moral order which cannot be derisively swept aside as passe "social issues." Neither "fiscal conservatism" nor liberty can exist without "Thou shalt not steal." There can be no rapprochement with libertarianism, not even as a private matter, and the First Amendment must be rescued from those who insist its intent was inspired by the ideological thinking of the Enlightenment's atheists rather than by the progress of specifically Christian weariness with internecine warfare over religion.

Why Did God Create The World?

It is one of those odd sweeping questions of idealistic youth which I've never really outgrown.

Today I cannot remember what caused the original fascination with the question. During college I think it might have gained some momentum from the ideas of the creation theologians of Europe whom Bo Reicke once told me about. I've still got those books . . . in a box somewhere. I'll have to dig them out and look at them again.

I do remember thinking at the time that an appropriate theological answer had to be "love," but every time I discussed this with serious people, the discussion, I think by mutual perception, always ended up feeling kind of, well, corny! 

The trouble was I couldn't exactly nail down any sources which propounded that answer, nor could I really point to a fully worked out history of the idea. I dabbled with it for a while, and like so many ideas and enthusiasms of youth, it ceased to preoccupy my attention eventually.

And then I happened to read this today and all that came flooding back. The selection finally gives me an historical fix on the problem, from an essay on the trinitarian theology of Jonathan Edwards, by one Daniel M. Harrell, here:

The infinite happiness of God in community generates a delight that cannot be contained (for then God would be less happy, a logical impossibility). God's love radiates outward, emanating forth like a fountain. Edwards preached:

There is in heaven this fountain of love, this eternal three in one, set open without any obstacle to hinder access to it. There this glorious God is manifested and shines forth in full glory, in beams of love; there the fountain overflows in streams and rivers of love and delight, enough for all to drink at, and to swim in, yea, so as to overflow the world as it were with a deluge of love.

It was this unhindered, radiating deluge of love that resulted in creation. Trinitarian love is manifest in the interrelatedness of creation—nothing exists in pure independence. Trinitarian love is manifest in redemption that ushers saints into participation in God's overflowing happiness, a happiness that extends infinitely into eternity.

As it turns out, Edwards was also responsible for another aspect of Christian theological thinking which prepared the way for the psychological-social interpretation of the Christian life as "relational," a concept derived directly from his conception of the trinity and necessarily following from it. It is uncanny how in Edwards' conception of the trinity the only begotten son of God is a kind of perfect projection of the infinitely perfect thoughts of the father, which conception has an interesting bearing on what people mean when they say they have a personal relationship with Jesus. Is he not also a projection of our own minds, mediated by the thoughts we have of him, absorbed through the Bible?

In retrospect it's no wonder that the interdisciplinary department in which I studied religion so long ago with experts in Hinduism, Confucianism, Judaism and Islam failed me on this one. The Great Awakening wasn't exactly their forte.

Looks like I have some work cut out for me. At least I know where to start.

(originally posted June 2011)