psst: religious stories that could affect the news

There is an election going on in the Congo, and it could result in another eruption of the murderous civil war there.

and then there is the Ebola epidemic complicating the election.

StrategyPage has a report LINK

the religious part? Well, the Catholic bishops are trying to monitor the elections to prevent fraud.

and guess what? The gov't shut down the internet to stop "fake news".

Hmm... sounds familiar.

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StrategyPage also discusses the Terrorism problem of radical Islam: A lot of it is related to Arab culture, but with oil money spreading the stricter form of Islam, the problem spread.

There is little middle management (like NCOs in the military). The “ruling class” (owners, officers, or officials) and everyone else is treated like two different social castes and there is no effort to bridge the gap using what the West calls middle management. “The people” are treated harshly.

This attitude dates back to the earliest civilizations there.

Right now I am listening to various lectures on early city states and empires, where such things started (not just in Mesopotamia and Egypt, but in China). The need to regulate irrigation and to run cities probably was the reason for the rulers to take over, but they all seemed to end up in tyrannies that treated the peasants like tools to be used.

Too many lecturers laud these civilizations for their wonderful buildings etc. But who speaks for the average working man?

Ironically, this is where the Bible stories come in. When the Israelites asked for a king, they were warned the king would steal their wealth and sons (for the army and to build stuff) and they were better off without it. And the laments of Jeremiah show the dark side of being conquered by these powerful empires.

Similarly, the Greeks who fought off the Persians also fought for the common man, and their plays often lamented the sufferings of those not in power (Antigone, Trojan women). Even the bloody book the Iliad graphically describes how someone dies, but often adds a short comment on their family left behind.

western civilization is based on the Bible and the Greco Roman civilization, which insists on the freedom of the normal working stiff, not just for the nobility. And as SP points out that this idea is missing in much of the Arab world today:

These counterproductive traits are ancient and predate Islam but the nature of Islamic theology has perpetuated them in Moslem nations. While the West eventually separated church and state (helped by a few useful bits of advice in the Christian bible) that is more difficult with Islam because the word “Islam” literally means “submission” and the Moslem scripture is quite specific about Islam being a way of life and a form of government as well as a religion.

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The final religion story is how China is trying to remake religion.

(nothing new with this: see the persecution of Buddhism in the 800s for not being in line with Chinese culture).

so China signed an agreement with the Vatican and guess what? they are now persecuting and subverting Catholicism there (sort of like what happened after the Vatican signed an agreement with Nazi Germany in an attempt to stop persecution of the church there: the Nazi immediately ignored it, and it meant that the Catholic opposition essentially was silenced). Sigh. They never learn.

But anyway, the Chinese government is going against the underground Catholic church and against the Protestants too, not to mention independent Buddhists and "folk religion", and a major push against Islamic believers.

The push against Islam is trying to remake Islam into a Chinese image and AlJ covers it LINK and this includes "re education camps". and is complicated because it is not just a religious persecution but against an ethnic minority.

So could this result in an eventual reform of Islam, which could spread into Pakistan and Central Asia along with Chinese business development? Or will it result in a civil war in China?

Religious ideas have spawned civil wars in the past there. (see Wikipedia on the Dungan revolt, by the Han Muslims... it's not just a Uighur problem)
and of course, the Taiping Rebellion could be seen as either a proto communist uprising or a rebellion by a pseudoChristian cult.

CFR article discusses religion in China.

When religion is independent of the state, it means there is another source of authority: and the prince/government cannot be absolute.

In China, the idea was that the Emperor had the "mandate of Heaven": and if he was bad, he would lose the mandate of heaven, which would pass to the rebels (if they were successful).

but the main source of instability in China today might be the growing middle class (who often embrace religion) not the religions per se.

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update: GetReligionblog discusses the Ukraine/Russia split in Orthodoxy.

The issue here is not what churches remain in Communion with Moscow or the Ecumenical Patriarch. The issue is how many other patriarchs declare themselves to be in Communion with this alleged new church in Kiev. This is what matters to the Orthodox, not whether Kiev is in Communion with the U.S. State Department and the European Union.

I know very little about the politics, but in western PA we had a lot of eastern European immigrants who celebrated Russian Christmas, ... there was both a Byzantine church that recognized the pope and a Ukrainian Orthodox church in our small town: and the local Russian Orthodox priest rejected the latter as a valid church because it lacked the continuity of the priesthood.

here is a summary on the churches.