I went to Vietnam a couple times. If you hang out downtown in the city, you might get a random Jehovah’s Witness or Seventh Day Adventist* try to chat you up. “Oh, we can’t do missionary work out in the open, so we just do one-on-one conversations like this”. Despite the lack of “Jesus saves, die sinner” signs in Hanoi, you can definitely find Catholic and Protestant churches in Vietnam.
The Western press likes to piss and moan about settler nation missionaries that go, without proper visas mind you, to spread their Western versions of Christianity to the DPRK, only to get deported. So am I allowed to enter a white people country without a visa to stir up trouble and expect no consequences???
I’m the furthest thing from an expert on Myanmar. I get everything I know from Burmese friends. But if you look into the minority people situation, many of them are being heavily proselytised by the worst of the Amerikan type. I don’t want the Pat Robertson’s the world anywhere near struggling people.
*I’m definitely not saying that JWs and SDAs are anywhere near the worst as Christian sects go.
I mean all the holy books are in Actually Existing Churches a tool to control the worshippers, so when the worshippers don’t have the moral discernment outside of what the book (and better yet, priests) says, then it’s working as intended.
That’s why liberation theology seems self-defeating to me. Cherry-picking out the parts where he says to sell all your stuff and give the proceeds to the poor is all well and good so long as no one follows it up with all the other passages that undermine or contradict those passages. Either the Bible is true and accurate (in which case the balance of history is decidedly not on the side of socialism) or it’s inaccurate and you have to use some sort of moral reasoning external to the book, which throws into question the whole idea of submitting to an unreachable, uncommunicative, and unquestionable supernatural moral authority in the first place.
It seems more intellectually honest to just start from the position of atheism.