MCLC: Putin wins Confucius Peace Prize (8,9)

[Denton, Kirk]

MCLC LIST
From: rujie wang <rwang at wooster.edu>
Subject: Putin wins Confucius Peace Prize (8)
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Hating Mao and CCP does not necessarily make one unlike them or less
Maoist who would reduce everything to what he knows about Chinese
communist revolution. That kind of reductionism and intolerance are not
limited to "atheist China", CCP, or Mao but evident in "God-fearing West"
and loving Christians as well: "Moreover, if you are atheist, you have no
reason to believe your actions will be judged by an Almighty just Judge
one day, so what is to prevent you from doing as you please?" The
self-righteousness of this tyrannical proportion is also seen in Mao who
believed that no literature is literature unless it served the people: "To
serve them, we must take the class stand of the proletariat and not that
of the petty bourgeoisie. Today, writers who cling to an individualist,
petty-bourgeois stand cannot truly serve the masses of revolutionary
workers, peasants and soldiers. Their interest is mainly focused on the
small number of petty-bourgeois intellectuals. This is the crucial reason
why some of our comrades cannot correctly solve the problem of 'for
whom?'" If we really feel bad for "the untold millions [that] died at the
hands of official and officially imposed atheism," try to be more tolerant
of different opinions and less self-righteous and godly.

Rujie

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From: tom moran <moran at middlebury.edu>
Subject: Putin wins Confucius Peace Prize (9)

I'd like to agree with and second everything Lucas Klein says in his
response to Bill Goldman's post, including the bit about being an atheist.
Me too (like Woody Guthrie my religious preference is "all or none"). I
was at first offended at some of what Goldman wrote. Then mostly amused by
the idea that because I don't believe in God, I might just kill to hold
on to power.

Also, Osama bin Laden was a theist, and the folks who run Hamas are
theists, and so, like John Sexton, I find Goldman's logic puzzling. If you
tell me that Osama bin Laden was a bad guy, and I know he was a theist,
and you imply that Hamas is full of bad guys, and I know they are theists
too, then you can't turn around and tell me that the difference between
good guys and bad guys comes down to a difference between atheism and
theism.

Or you can. You can if you tell me that being a theist is not enough and
that I have to believe in one particular deity of your choosing. And that,
I¹d say, is what is dangerous. What is dangerous is anybody who thinks
that they are in privileged possession of the sole truth. That makes any
belief system dangerous, be it theistic or atheistic.

Me, to get this back to what MCLC is about, I'll  go with Bei Daoism. Bei
Dao has said, "There are many truths in the world, and many of them are
contradictory. We should allow other people¹s truths to exist<this is the
premise on which our own truth can exist."

Also, in an earlier post in this thread the point was made that Confucius
"never would have approved of their [the CCP's] atheistic tyranny and
illegality and suppression of the Chinese people's freedom and rights."

I have to note the irony that Liu Xiaobo might not agree with this comment
about the "revered sage."

In "Yesterday's Stray Dog Becomes Today's Guard Dog" (both dogs are
Confucius), Liu says Confucius was not a sage, and he writes, "How costly
has it been for the Chinese people that this particular thinker
[Confucius]<this most sly, most smooth, most utilitarian, most worldy-wise
Confucius, who shied away from public responsibility and showed no empathy
for people who suffer<became their sage and exemplar for two thousand
years?" This essay (my translation) is included in the forthcoming "Liu
Xiaobo: No Enemies, No Hatred," edited by Perry Link, Tienchi Martin-Liao
and Liu Xia.

Who knows, Liu Xiaobo might even think that the CONFUCIUS Peace Prize
SHOULD go to allies of totalitarianism.

Tom Moran