China and Jesus

Funny thing. I almost didn’t set the timer tonight. I have things to say and I want to say them. Not that long ago I read the John Le Carre novel The Spy Who Came in from the Cold and one of the lines in it is a Soviet spy laughing because he realizes the British and he aren’t so different. The West held itself up as the paragons of good but when it comes to acceptable death in the fight to stop Communism they weren’t any different than the Communists in the fight to stop Capitalism. They were two sides of the same coin embodied by the Stalin quote that 500,000 liquidated is a statistic and one man dying in a traffic accident is a national tragedy.

I bring this up because I saw the news that China recently lifted the restriction on number of children per family to three. In this day and age three children is a lot and it was funny because that is the exact number we have. With all the discussion about early childhood development programs and infrastructure in America there have been some discussions on the affordability of children and I got to say not a lot of people can afford to have three children. So while China makes a law to limit the number of children our system makes it cost probative to have just around the same number of children, and that’s the joke. We aren’t so different,

Now for the Jesus portion. A friend online shared a post talking about how Christianity needs to do what Christianity has done before and incorporate the myths and rituals of the younger generation in order to attract them. It’s why Christmas has so many pagan rituals incorporated into it. When we think of that we think of innocent things like Pokeman and Harry Potter but as I thought I realized a certain segment of the Christian community has already done this. It’s why Jesus is a blond haired, blue eyed, proud, gun loving, American. It is why mega churches drape themselves in the American flag and hold men’s rights meetings. There is already a segment of the population that has incorporated their modern myths and rituals into Christianity and it is neither benign nor fun.

Those were my two major thoughts for the day until the stuff hit the fan this evening, but that is a discussion I do not wish to have at this moment. You’ll have to make due with China and Jesus for this evening’s post.