Comments by "Voryn Rosethorn" (@vorynrosethorn903) on "" video.

  1. China has been deeply influenced by Buddhism, though it never supplanted Confucianism (though not for lack of trying) it has at times matched or surpassed Taoism in cultural and moral influence, indeed it could be said to have been China who spread it and preserved it's relevance as a part of their role as the cultural, social and political hegemon of their region for centuries. You are right about Chinese attitudes to sin but not to western, Confucius viewed humans as innately good, modern westerners also do, but historical westerners didn't and Christianity still doesn't. Christianity supported harsh punishments and believe that people are constantly struggle against inclination towards evil, as well as repent their inevitable failures. This created a very trusting society, which was intensely legalistic (in part because you were answerable to God for your oaths, which meant you could go to hell for breaking them) and managed to maintain being both individualist and harmonious. This broke apart due to religious infighting in the reformation mixed with the power of the printing press to spread ideas, true or false. During the enlightenment these circumstances lead to philosophers assuming that all the harmoniousness in society was natural to mankind and that the problems were created by the Catholics (many of these people were influenced by the propaganda campaigns of a century before which historians have only recently started to disprove) and later on Christians as a whole, some like the Americans created a political philosophy out of it and left existing belief structures intact (this is under the influence of the English school of liberalism), but in France Rousseau would become the many source of all thought since then. Rousseau thought that men were naturally good and pure in a state of nature but that society was impure and corrupted them, he accepted the Christian categorisation of the natural vices that people are inclined to but said that they were good by nature of being natural and the the virtues are evil because they are imposed on man. He also had a vision of utopia, these has had profound effects on western society with there in effect being a religious struggle between the Christians and the Rousseauians for centuries now, the Rousseauians have by now pretty thoroughly won, having taken over even many churches but there thought is all the same anathema to any western thought previous to three centuries ago and much in the intervening period. I was reading something the other day by a Japanese man and it became clear that most East Asians are unaware of the delineation and tend to mix the ideologies together, though there is a tradition of syncretism in the East there is not in the West, we for centuries burnt people who did not conform and even now ideologies have little room for competition and tend to live by the sword. In short the libertinism comes from the new worship of human freedom, often to the point of believing the will free from the body. Christianity was morally uncompromising and would have punished many of our current cultural expressions with fire and brimstone, they were early and profound enemies of slavery, infanticide, abortion, sexual immortality, adultery, abortion, the selling of children and the mistreatment of women. You can have a guess how much influence they have when our society looks like this, the Chinese have encountered actual Christians before as the Victorian period was a period of Christian revival, you can likely attest to them being a lot more formidable than whatever moral system we are supposedly working under now. Likewise there is much talk in officialdom of the period of the right to good governance, you can judge for yourself what we have now.
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