How does the Chinese state deal with religion?

and you can't never you know there's no very little room to maneuver and you know that's what you are where really it is a journey of humans of man to discover god it's you know you're going through life you're developing i mean isn't because that's how i see iman really i see iman not as this kind of static this kind of mold that people want to you know super fit onto everybody but it's an organic journey and it's going to you know it's going to go here there there's going to be like you said you know like at one point i don't know you know i i don't know what i am

i don't know where i i'm just i'm just going along it's it's this journey yeah um i mean do you feel do you feel that especially today uh or maybe actually that's the question if more so today that religion being hijacked this institutionalized uh religion what are your thoughts on oh man the the the best you know like

like is islam is interesting i think it's i think islam is cool um but but islam is kind of boring compared to what's happening in china right the chinese interface with religion as a whole is it's the cutting edge of like just like i don't want to call it absurdity but and when i say it when i say islam is interesting i mean in that in that sense yeah a lot of the uh a lot of the discoveries of of kind of islam and um the back and forth is is like the same conversations that's been

kind of exactly and at the end of the day it's like do you agree with this or not but even even some of the innovation uh that we consider to be innovation in islam is not really innovating innovation it's like it's just a reprisal of some old point of view or quadri just you know just something that no they were doing this this was one movement from this period of time and they just kind of regained a certain research and so it regained a certain popularity or a vice video came out about them and it's like oh did you know about these guys i said oh i didn't um but you look into the research and it's like they've been doing that for a thousand years right but in china um and i've been studying this

you know haphazardly i was i happened to be in singapore and uh uh my friend um uh taoism is very heavy in singapore right so yes muslim right but there's also you know taoism there's some other things some some other aspects going on down there um and i remember we were down there it was super smoky super small this was a couple years ago super smoky smoky smoky and we were driving past this temple and uh there's this big basket out and it was just on fire right now smoke smoke and i actually i was like yo like what what uh i was like what is that right yeah and uh my friend was like oh man they that's

they uh it's it's like uh they're burning um items you know to send into the afterlife okay okay okay like what are they you're like do i take the shrooms now or do i take the shrooms later on i mean you see this this way this way get interesting and it may be interesting for me you know yeah uh because things like this in islam is like what no way right so anyway i'm you know like what are they burning you know it's like oh they're burning like this fake

money okay i was like fake money it's like yeah okay and it's like okay what else are they he's like yeah but you know sometimes they'll burn like little fake houses right right and also they'll burn like fake laptops and like fake rolexes it's like a symbolic kind of uh sacrifice of but but not because it's really meant to materialize in the next into the other world so you can have a imagine and a mercedes and an ipad and maids and it got to the point where they would burn uh little paper dolls of people

right and my mind was blown i was like oh my god right and started to research what it was the tradition's been around for for a while um it's not nothing like super controversial but one of the things that came up was that uh and i went to one of the stores in chinatown in singapore where they were where they sold this stuff and it was for real it was like legit you could a car wow okay an industry on the back of all of this a whole industry of this right paper these things billions of dollars and that you can like burn and and send to people uh they called it hill money um is this also muslims there as well

part of this culture or i mean when you think of singapore yeah you just think yeah singapore has a muslim population a lot of that but it also has you know it's mixed it's kind of an open society um but you think you know malaysia is right there indonesia is right yeah exactly very heavily muslim countries but so so anyway i go to the store i buy i like i got to buy some of this stuff as fast but they they called it they called it hell money okay um because uh the christian christian kind of missionaries were trying to like demonize it right and it was like oh so we call we call that hell money right but anyway so anyway my mind is blown right and i'm read the whole now this whole time i'm

in singapore my whole world has been hijacked because i'm get i get introduced to this this concept of burning not just i understand uh libations and stuff like that and and and and uh elder veneration and things that they even you might even see it putting uh uh offerings out and sacrifice even sacrifices when you think of like uh uh eid right um but this was took the whole this this this this is a bit a bit almost furonic like from the egyptian that's passing on to the afterlife yeah this is this is fascinating and so so in that so the whole not the time i'm there i'm just researching research and

researching and uh it comes up in in in china right in modern times and there was this uh one of the one of the examples that came up in like the wikipedia was there was this super huge uh television show in china called uh i think it was called like cow yogurt supergirl or something like that but just kind of imag imagine like uh the voice or like uh uh america's next uh star whatever that is right one of those shows people come and they sing and you know the audience votes and

they win or they lose so anyway um the show is super popular right to the point where it was like it was almost being considered kind of like democracy in in china right because so many people were voting right so it's probably like the first time people were you know voting even though there is voting in china but yeah anyway we'll get into that yeah but some type of voting anyway so anyway the show's super huge super super popular to the point where people were making uh dolls out of the the the more popular contestants to be burned to send them into the next world as in in a good way or a bad way in a good way

in a good way right okay in a good way not like but like you know the same process of okay you know modern times this is what people want the show super popular let's send these these people over there and uh the chinese government started to kind of like look at it as being like that's absurd right like this is getting out of hand you know people are sent burning mansions and burning watches and all these other stuff that's in over there and so the chinese government kind of clamped down on this on the practice and was like look you can burn like the money and

more traditional stuff but all this new laptops and televisions and all this other crazy stuff like i gotta cut that out um the the ccp is very much so secular right and yeah you think about and this is our relative because it leads us into like shinjan and stuff that's relative to the muslim community today um into the world at large but china's relationship to religion and the government's relation to the religion and the institutions relationship to religion is super strange so they reference that okay this this this act of the chinese government kind of clamping down on that particular aspect of that practice

is relative to a campaign that they had in the 80s where was like they're trying to um you know you know marxism and and you know it's debate and marxism of like humanism and what does that mean for people to have like certain liberal ideas about what humanism is or conservative ideas very very kind of academic stuff but it was kind of spilling over into you know how much access do we allow the country to have to western media or to have to this or to have to that's after that um and so there's a big campaign called the anti-spiritual pollution campaign right