I don't care if it's Gods, Devils, Angels, Souls, Spirits, Ghosts, Afterlives, Heaven, Hell, Purgatory, Reincarnation, Karma, 'ENERGIES', Auras, Crystals, Voodoo Dolls, Curses, Remote Viewing, Telekinesis, ESP, Psychics, Mediums, or friggin' Witches and Leprechauns.

If you believe in any of the sorts of magical nonsense listed above ... you're religious, in my book.

More basically, you either live in reality, or you don't.

Most of the world with the exception of the far east is heavily invested in monotheism. As such it's hard for some to grasp the concept of religion without theism. One of the frequent posters here routinely conflates those two things even when talking about people from the far east. The world is filled with people who subscribe to metaphysical ideas without the omnipotent sky daddy add-on feature.

Outside the Abrahamic faiths, religion and the various related categories like ancestor worship, superstition, philosophy, magic, cultural practice etc. are much more fluid and non-exclusionary. Unlike Western religion, there was never an idea of One True Belief, with all others being evil. So people were much likely to integrate different beliefs than be intolerant of them.

The Chinese Communists did come in and tried to suppress religion. But this was something they got from Lenin and Stalin rather than a Chinese tradition.

The way Eastern religions work make me feel more positive on religion as a whole. If we could learn to do religion the Eastern way, there would be less religious intolerance in the future.

unless theism is involved, there is no religion. That's why someone might think that China is trying to wipe out religion. It's not, really, but it is skeptical, with good reason, about western religions. Culturally, they are not really a good match for Eastern cultures, and China is certainly one of those.

Theistic religions tend to promote authoritarianism, and lend to it a deity that has the last word. In China, the last word is given by the government. Once, that was a chieftain or emperor. Today, it is a tyrannical regime. There is little difference, except that an over-riding deity makes tyranny more difficult in some ways.

Some claim that China is intolerant of religion. In reality, China is intolerant of monotheistic, rule-based religions. It's fine with it's own ancient folk religions, as is shown by the fact that 80% of its population still maintains some relationship with those folk religions.

Some of us think we're smart. We're not that smart, really, when it comes to cultures that aren't the same as our own.

The problem with that approach is it leaves you wide open for intolerant religions to worm their way into your society. The reason why Islam is the fastest growing religion is because it's exploding in the East and with it all the problems that come with intolerant religion.

When religionists speak of religious "tolerance", what they really mean is you are supposed to tolerate their religion. It never seems to work that well the other way around.

Though we may recognize the evils of intolerance, it actually can work as a vehicle for gaining and keeping power.

The formula for that success really hasn't changed in thousands of years. Prey on people looking for hope and then keep them isolated and fearful of outside influence. Once dominance starts to establish you can start taking direct action against any dissent.

Xians claim that the US is ("was"?) a Xian country.

The response is that "the United States is in no way founded on the Christian religion," so of course not. There's even a Constitutional amendment interpreted to build a "wall of separation" between church and state!

Of course, both are ("were"?) true.

The US was not founded on Xianity nor does it have explicitly and avowedly Xian precepts as part of its organic law, so it's not a Xian country. That's "US as governmental system." The US population was self-described as Christian, so therefore it is a Christian country. The majority of the population was Christian, and to the extent a country has citizens those citizens were Xians.

Making such an obvious distinction--no matter how much it's a "minor nuance of no importance"--seems butt-obvious.

Is China a religious country?

Of course not, it's atheist. Of course, most of the population is religious.



Of course, then there's the second "nuance"--what's a "religion," since many of religions lack an obvious or explicit deity (or deities). Much of animism, Taoism, Confucianism (damned, almost misspelled that "Confusionism&quot , etc., etc., aren't "religions"--but adherents still want the symbols to be their religious identifiers on things like gravestones. (It's just that once you say a religion doesn't need a deity, it starts looking like a set of values + doctrines + rituals + organization + adherents, and some pretty religion-like secular organizations start serving the same roles with the same structures, and people start talking about them as 'secular religions,' which really pisses off those who insist that religions are evil but their own person values + doctrine + rituals + organization are in no way religions because religions are evil.)