Why are we still SO IGNORANT about China?

most people in china don't believe in
god the question doesn't mean anything to them the question is unfamiliar to them the concept of god is unfamiliar to them yeah i know some people may nitpick and may complain about how simple i make it seem but it simply is that simple how is it possible how is it possible that people are so ignorant about the history politics and religion of china [Music] let's talk about china what about the guy in china in china it doesn't even matter whether you believe in god or not the question is completely irrelevant it wouldn't make sense for an average chinese person to sit here and to explain to the chinese people why he doesn't believe in god because nobody believes in god people will just sit and be like why are you telling us this most people in china don't believe in god the question doesn't mean anything to them and this is not an active act of disbelief of disbelieving you know the question is unfamiliar to them the concept of god is unfamiliar to them they're not discussing whether they do believe or don't believe in god the question doesn't exist it's irrelevant most people in china will never become muslims and will never become christians and will never find the one true god so why do they exist how is it conceivable that one religion is true one god is true and he expects everybody to seek and find him that he expects every chinese person to seek and find this true religion to find this true god but most chinese people never engage in that so let alone being successful they all just live and die without ever thinking about god while we are sitting here talking about whether god exists or not like it is a universal existential question because to us this is an existential question because we have a history of abrahamic monetary but they don't which is why it's not even a trivial question to them meanwhile according to islam islam is true and all those people who are born into islam will conveniently go to heaven because they will live as muslims and die as muslims even if they don't do anything and no one has an answer about all those poor chinese people whom allah has created or god has created but that he doesn't seem to care about yeah i know some people may nitpick and may complain about how simple i make it seem but it simply is that simple what this man has said to you is just as absurd as if he told you that aristotle back in ancient athens had absolutely no concept of god that if you walked up to aristotle and started a conversation about faith about whether or not people believe in god he'd just have no idea what you were talking about he just have no concept now i say aristotle specifically rather than the average man on the street in ancient greece because in case you haven't heard aristotle's speculations about the true nature of god were so appealing to christians they feel that this is so compatible with their faith that even though aristotle was a pagan even though aristotle in terms of doctrine will end up in hell and this is addressed in dante's inferno by the way um dante it invents a whole new concept of uh uh an intermediate state between if and hell where people like aristotle go up but prior to dante's poetry which is non-canon it's not dante's work is not considered part of the bible it's not quite considered the word of god prior to dante inventing this uh interregnum state here uh you know by the way aristotle's in hell despite all this christians embraced aristotle as a church father as one of the crucial most important philosophers for the catholic faith and today i'm really surprised in the united states protestants in america they still really embrace aristotle also see what he has to say about god is so compatible with what they want to hear how is it possible in the 21st century that people are still so balefully ignorant about china and how is it possible for this youtuber to just take his fantasy and project it onto asia for you know could be china it could be india in this case china in the same way that europeans did not even in the 19th century this is really going back to the 18th century we have a long history of this pattern playing out again and again and again now in china 10 heaven what you saw on screen there that is more like the abstract faceless concept of god that today is the most popular idea of god in christianity judaism and to my knowledge in islam now you know islam covers a large and diverse part of the world's surface i don't know if that's the most popular thing about the muslim god in indonesia for example but you know certainly the university educated muslims i've encountered some from iran and some of the world they really are thinking of god in the same terms as this chinese symbol tien you know not that god is a particular person who walks with his feet on the ground and has hands and eyes and a face and emotions not that god can weep or laugh but that god is this abstract transcendental i principle note i once read a translation uh into english of one of the very first books ever published in the cree language so cree nehewen is an indigenous language of canada so what most people call american indians great term the the native people uh founded in canada the united states and this is a christian preacher explaining to these people the concept of god and this was already at a stage where they'd encountered enough uh christian missionaries that they had their own views on this matter and he's answering objections from them where they say look we've read the bible or they've had some contact with these bibles in the bible it says things like god has hands and god walked from this place that had met this person like it's describing god as a physical person on the ground they could relate to that right they know what you're saying is not true and the christian preacher is is replying back i think he was a jesuit this guy said no no no um that's just an allegory no no no really god has no hands and no feet he's not a physical person this this is this conflict has existed within uh christianity at least for centuries um there's a 19th century german philosopher called max sterner and there's one portion he only really wrote one famous book he did a few other things but he has this one famous book called the ego on its own which by the way is rollicking um atheist anti-establishment diatribe it's completely anti-christian there's one portion that most people perceive as being racist against chinese people it helps if you read it in german and not in english by the way but the real point of that portion of the book is to ridicule europeans and among and ridicule christianity in europe at that time one thing he says is look the most sophisticated philosophies among the christians all they accomplish is catching up with the chinese what you've done is taken the judeo-christian god who had a beard and a voice and hands and feet and interacts like a he's a superhero originally in the older parts of the old testament the same way zeus is a kind of superhero you've taken him and transformed him or reinterpreted him into ten he says i remember he says you worship ten the god of the chinese you know this more abstract principle of heaven ruling earth right now there may be a lot of things wrong with the philosophy of max turner and it may there may even be some racism in there don't get me wrong um he talks about the mongolism of europeans that that europe emerged from the dark ages only to become mongolians ourselves in trying to catch up with the sophistication of chinese culture so if you read that as racist still the point is satirical to really take a poke at the pretensions that europeans have to being superior to the chinese um the point is here aristotle he does have this abstract monotheistic concept normally in english we say the godhead of kind of the one true god this very abstract god but of course aristotle also has a polytheistic concept of of many gods with particular names of particular people like zeus and and what have you zeus and then getting into demigods like uh heracles hercules you know the uh colorful cast of superheroes that people in ancient greece uh were more familiar with and household gods or what have you now today in hinduism modern hinduism we don't have to go back to ancientism talk about very much the same thing they have a monotheistic concept of god they also have a polytheistic uh worldview so on and so forth now in china yes unless we're going all the way back to the joe dynasty unless we're going back to pre-hand china thousands and thousands of years ago then we're basically talking let's say for the last 2 500 years in china to use a nice round number we are talking about a china where they do have this abstract monotheistic idea of god tien they also have the concept of particular gods particular demigods particular demons and then there's the lively competition between buddhism which is either gradually or suddenly imported from india on more than one route depending on which theory you subscribe to about how how exactly buddhism between buddhism and then this variety of indigenous philosophical and religious tradition all of them are full of gods all of them are full of supernatural conceptions and all of them of course are concerned really concerned with concepts like when you die do you become a ghost you know like people cared about this stuff you see it throughout literature when i started studying things ancient and asian i became a kind of expert in places like laos cambodia thailand uh to some extent sri lanka myanmar a lot of my stuff pretended myanmar and even then it wasn't like mainstream myanmar was like northeastern myanmar oh yeah then i got heavily into uh indigenous people of yunnan china these are not today politically powerful influential thinkers and whenever i meet other scholars um for example to talk about india i would always just claim look i'm not really a specialist in india like i only deal with india as it kind of connects to this other part of the world and then within five minutes i'd realize i know much more about history politics and religion of india that the other person i'm talking to this happened to me again and again again i was like okay at what point do i stop warning people that i'm not really an expert in india because everyone else's level of expertise is so abominably low and yes i am talking about people with phds i'm definitely including people with phds uh it's happening to me getting it again with china it's mind-blowing to me i mean i can't really make excuses for people and say well cambodia doesn't count cambodia counts [ __ ] i mean to me haiti counts if you're talking about the abolition of slavery the history of the abolition of slavery in haiti counts if you're talking about european colonialism european imperialism the history of haiti counts the fact that it's a small island doesn't mean the example doesn't matter and there are really profound lessons to be learned from the history of haiti that still matter today so you know in the same way i value i care about cambodia and i basically require the rest of humanity to care also kind of how dare you you know remove them from the ledger of disasters and human history we all throw around this phrase so casually learning the lessons of history yeah well the verb there is learn yeah it's hard work you know if you put in a few hours to learn something with the history of cambodia it's going to enrich your life it really is i mean that take take some time out of your schedule playing world of warcraft to learn something about you'd be amazed at just how rewarding it is um but you know sure you can't expect people to have even read one wikipedia article about the history of cambodia i get that i had to let to live with that for years and years and years and then i shift into dealing with china how is it possible how is it possible that people are so ignorant about the history politics and religion of china how is it possible that they shamelessly and seriously advance these claims without one google search without one check of a wikipedia article i i just don't get it babe could you grab for me uh sunzer there in the the middle rank of the the bookshelf look you know what what is what is important in history this is this is the sun's uh no offense no i'm guessing you've never heard of this book before all right why why is this book more or less important historically than aristotle who decided which books you read in school and what matters and at what point are you going to step up take responsibility for your own education and not just do the reading yourself but really reconsider what it is that's important for a well-educated person to have read what's important for someone someone like avistay profit or someone like myself to have read to have considered before coming here on youtube and fronting like you're a leader of public opinion like you're a public intellectual i don't mean this in a shallow or catty way i hope some of you in the audience can take some positive motivation from this because truth is it's not hard to learn all right i'm not i'm not even talking about something that's as difficult to learn as how to do your own taxes all right i'm talking about having some awareness of your own ignorance and taking some responsibility for your own education preferably before you come on the internet like this and make a goddamn fool yourself