I recently wrote about law professors who embraced Chinese censorship on the Internet as a mind-blowing contradiction for intellectuals. However, China has done one better. A school textbook changes a critical story in the Bible to support the authoritarian rule of the Communist Party. In the Chinese version of the story from The Gospel of John, Jesus still stops people from stoning a woman to death but when they leave, he then stones her to death because . . . well . . . she deserved it and that is the law. Fortunately, Jesus did not appear to make any direct reference to rendering Hong Kong unto Beijing.
University of Electronic Science and Technology Press, a government-run company, published a school textbook to teach “professional ethics and the law.”
The book reportedly relates the famous passage in John 8:7 where Jesus stops the stoning of the woman for adultery. A group reminded Jesus that an adulterer should be stoned to death by Mosaic Law but “he lifted up himself, and said unto them, He that is without sin among you, let him first cast a stone at her.”
In the Chinese version, once the crowd left, Jesus killed her after stating “I too am a sinner. But if the law could only be executed by men without blemish, the law would be dead.”
It is a type of law-and-order, tough-on-crime Jesus. In China, of course, the communist regime has many “blemishes” from corruption to repression. However, it can now claim Jesus as someone who would insist on maintaining law and order or “law would be dead.”
No need to read the Bible. After all, “To read too many books is harmful.” The Bible was usually at the top of Mao’s list of harmful reading.
The state uses religion or tries to replace it. Napoleon explained :
“How can one have order in the state without religion? Society cannot exist without inequality of fortunes and inequalities of fortunes cannot exist without religion. How can a man dying from hunger sit next to a man who is belching from overeating, unless there is an authority that says ‘God wills it so.’” And added:
“It is necessary that there be rich and poor in this world. We need religion to say that in eternity it will be different. I see in religion not the mystery of the incarnation but the mystery of the social order. It relegates to the heavens the idea of inequality so that the rich are not massacred here on earth.”
With regard to religion being replaced, here is one example, part of a poem which was published in Pravda on 28 August, 1936:
O Great Stalin, O Leader of the Peoples,
Thou who didst give birth to man,
Thou who didst make fertile the earth,
Thou who dost rejuvenate the Centuries,
Thou who givest blossom to the spring . . .
(Perhaps inspired by the deification of Stalin & the Kims of North Korea, the dictator of state capitalist China, Xi, has decided to follow in their footsteps…)
Little wonder Bakunin: said “A jealous lover of human liberty, and deeming it the absolute condition of all that we admire and respect in humanity, I reverse the phrase of Voltaire, and say that, if God really existed, it would be necessary to abolish him.”
Ironic that the CCP chose to distort a passage that many consider apocryphal anyway. I’ve heard of twisting the truth, but twisting a lie’s a new one for me.
Might have thought that Jonathan Turley would laud this creativity on the part of the CCP sponsored publisher: Freedom of Speech!
At some point this afternoon, Google access to the blog and particularly this thread was messed up so missing. Was a CCP site trasher the cause?
Pe Lo Si flit in but no good joss.