Gerri is *really* supposed to be editing her project report right now, but has gotten sidetracked. Obviously.

But I'm in the middle of it. My sis just showed my her friend's form teacher's blog tho, and I thought it was pretty funny, so I'm here blogging. That, and the fact that I was sitting in church today, listening and watching the things going on while half-awake (as usual), and being more cynical than usual; I think it's coz we just finished Religion in my last Soci tutorial.

There was this woman who was presenting all the stuff that she'd accomplished while on her missionary trip in China, and she was going on and on about how she'd managed to convert all these people to Christianity and whatnot, and when she said that she'd "brought the Kingdom of God into their lives", that really sparked it off for me.

So is the purpose of the missionaries really supposed to be about spreading their "good news" and their religion or is it really about conquering land for their "kingdom"? Does it then become a case of "my God is better than your God"? And do they even realise that in spreading their own religion and converting people, they're erasing the native religions that were there at first? And how can they be so sure that imposing their religion and ideas of a better life on these people really makes their lives better?

The woman was talking about the Akha and the Buyi people in China, and that they have no religion and whatever, but how on earth would she know? Maybe their religion just isn't in a form that she would recognise? As in, not in the same form as ours, with no one supreme god or anything like that; and evem if the closest that they come to religion is just in the form of rituals that they perform when anything especially good or bad happens, that doesn't mean that they're desperately in need of a religion or a god to worship or anything! I don't see how bringing religion to these people makes their lives better in any way; they may even be perfectly happy the way they are-- the missionaries are the ones imposing THEIR ideas of a better, more spiritual (or whatever) life on them, and in what way is this supposed to be "Christian"? It's oppressive.

And about the Chinese people that were living in the garbage dumps and the slums, well, I suppose religion does give them some kind of hope. And at the same time, this is the PERFECT example of Marx's argument that "Religion is the opiate of the people"; the "hope" that it gives these people distracts them from their deplorable living conditions, and it makes them look to the "better" afterlife that they envision as a result of being introduced to religion, and in so doing, they care less about their current conditions.

Wonderful. Sitting in church everyday shall become a weekly, enlightening piece of Soci research. :D

Oh, and my pastor's sermon today was on the need for patience, and one of the examples that he was giving was a garden; he way saying that you had to take time to weed it and water and prune the plants and everything, and you have to be patient coz it doesn't just happen overnight.

Really.

Well, just two days ago, my neighbours called in a landscaping company and they'd just barely started when I left for school sometime in the afternoon; when I came back, they had a garden! And that wasn't even "overnight"!

Two words, pastor. It's called "carpet grass".