Comments by "G L" (@gelinrefira) on "Is Confucianism a Religion?" video.

  1. "China is a huge market, we need to convert them." But they have this weird thing that they worship their ancestor and it is entrenched." "Say it is not really worship, just veneration so it does not violate our doctrine. Now go and convert them. God and the church will be most pleased with a couple hundred of million new Chinese believers." "As you command, your holiness."
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  2. It should also be noted that Confucius established his philosophical baseline in an age of strife - the Spring and Autumn Period. His take on why societies and counties failed is eminently on a non-spiritual side. Other than the Mandate of Heaven, there was not much tradition of using the divine to determine why the world was this way or that way. There are no angels coming down from heaven carrying messages from god, or if Zeus felt peckish that day and decide to punish some mortals for some offenses from long ago. It was just not a big thing in China for these kind of divine intervention on that spiritual level. Instead Confucius opted to look at the human conditions more in the practical and organizational aspects. He wanted to create a foundation at how good governance can occur, ask why states failed, why people revolt, and why bureaucracies fell apart, not about pleasing gods. Pleasing gods comes later when good governance is establishment - aka having the Mandate - and not that pleasing the gods give good governance. You get the Mandate by being a good king/emperor, you don't get it by pleasing Heaven first. Good governance is pleasing to Heaven. Everything in the Analects is based on the idea that big concept on the state level - government, the bureaucracy - comes from good foundation of small concepts like the family unit - father, mother, children, uncles, cousins, neighbors, community. The concept is a vertical integration of orderliness - father takes care of family, children take care of their parent to the King takes care of the country and the peasants take care of state. If everything happens according to this moral set of values, orderliness will emerge, then everything will fall into place. Hence why there is such an emphasis on concepts like justice, filial piety, moral righteousness, education because these are what he thought forms a strong foundation to the family unit, and thus to the country unit. There is nothing remotely spiritual as in the supernatural intervention or god pleasing in this viewpoint. Even ancestor worship is a form of ritualized reinforcement of humility, that one must remember the past wisdom to govern the future. It is however very logical and very practical in its mentality, and approaches and provide one of the first complete thought processes on how a state can operate on a gigantic scale. It is probably why the Han dynasty adopted Confucianism and it became the bureaucratic foundation and thought process of China like what Christianity and the concept of sin did for the west. Creating a good, sturdy and just bureaucracy is the point. Creating order out of chaos through human agency is the point. This is a very crucial viewpoint.
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  3. Confucianism is another thing that just does not fit neatly in Western sensibilities. Confucianism is basically an amalgam of a value system and principles of governance. We tend to think religion and government as two distinct entities. Confucianism is the government, and because the scholars and bureaucrats were far more focused on day to day governing and the overarching principles of good governance, the supernatural aspects were not emphasized and left to more spiritual based entities like Buddhisms and Daoism. Eventually they just all jumbled together anyway.
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