Is the Taiping Rebellion the 19th century's Chinese answer to Jim Jones and Marshall Applewhite? - Politics Forum.org | PoFo

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#14879334
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hong_Xiuquan

Hong Xiuquan was a Christian cult leader Religious nut that got 20mill killed and changed China forever.

Was he like Jones and Applewhite if they had of had real military power?

Did he feed off the populace hated of the Emperor and give it a Religious bent?

Sometimes I wonder if this is why Christianity is still a minority Religion in China.
#14879339
More like the Chinese version of Joseph Smith - rather than being 20th century cult leaders who killed/led in suicide their followers, they both founded, in the 19th century, cults based on Christianity, and fought wars. The Taiping Rebellion was just on a vast scale, compared to the skirmishes the Mormons had:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1838_Mormon_War
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_o ... mon_Exodus
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Utah_War

Christianity is still a minority religion in China because China had an established religious/philosophical system, and there was no point in converting to another cult. Same goes for India, Japan, etc., which didn't have any equivalent of the rebellion. And the same applies to why Mormonism is still a minority in the USA - most people look at Mormonism from outside and say "why should we bother to start believing a whole new set of nonsense?"
Last edited by Prosthetic Conscience on 14 Jan 2018 11:13, edited 1 time in total.
#14879340
colliric wrote:https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hong_Xiuquan

Hong Xiuquan was a Christian cult leader Religious nut that got 20mill killed and changed China forever.

Was he like Jones and Applewhite if they had of had real military power?

Did he feed off the populace hated of the Emperor and give it a Religious bent?

Sometimes I wonder if this is why Christianity is still a minority Religion in China.

Christianity has had a decisive impact on Chinese history, especially in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Sun Yat-Sen, who finally brought down the Qing Dynasty, was a Christian, and he often spoke of the importance of Christianity in freeing his mind from the millennia-old ideological strictures of traditional Chinese culture. In a deep sense, it was Christianity which made the Chinese Revolution of 1911 possible, and which guaranteed that it would be not merely a change of dynasty but an irreversible transformation of the nature of Chinese society itself. In that sense, Christianity played the same role in China in the 19th century that Marxism played in the 20th century.
#14879350
Prosthetic Conscience wrote:Christianity is still a minority religion in China because China had an established religious/philosophical system, and there was no point in converting to another cult. Same goes for India, Japan, etc., which didn't have any equivalent of the rebellion.

That was true of Europe and the Americas too once, look how that turned out.
#14879385
SolarCross wrote:Christianity is still a minority religion in China because China had an established religious/philosophical system, and there was no point in converting to another cult. Same goes for India, Japan, etc., which didn't have any equivalent of the rebellion.
That was true of Europe and the Americas too once, look how that turned out.

Europe yes, but that was well over 1,000 years ago. The Christianity that the Roman Empire converted to was significantly influenced by Greek philosophy like Platonism that was already inside it - it's almost a combination of Platonism, giving ideas like the Trinity, and Judaism. Northern Europe's conversion was from polytheism that wasn't organised as a state religion. In the Americas, the existing major civilisations were eradicated. In China, Japan and India, even if political control was lost, their cultures survived intact.
#14879392
A foreign religion can be a minority in a given culture, but still play a decisive role in the history of that culture, especially if that foreign religion bears the cultural values of societies which are more powerful or economically and technologically more advanced.

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