North Korea has been executing Christians because they see religion as a threat:
Only the founder of the country, Kim Il-sung, and his son, Kim Jong-il, may be worshipped, in mass public displays of fervour.
Despite the persecutions, it is thought up to 30,000 North Koreans may practise Christianity secretly in their homes.
A report by a number of South Korean groups highlights one particular case of a woman allegedly executed in public last month, in a northern town close to the Chinese border.
She was accused of distributing Bibles, spying for South Korea and the United States and helping to organise dissidents.
Her parents, husband, and children were sent to a prison camp.
Such reports are hard to verify, but North Korea is known to be intolerant of religion – it views any form of alternative social organisation as a competitor for its own, religion-like ideology.
The US government says just owning a Bible in North Korea may be a cause for torture and disappearance.
Let me be clear: while I dislike religion, I dislike religious persecution even more. Persecuting someone based on religion or ideology is unacceptable and must be stopped. I believe in freedom of and from religion. Hurting people because they believe something different from you is barbaric and unreasonable.
Personally my advice for Christians is to not go anywhere near places like North Korea, but the fervent ones won’t listen. They feel a need to take their message to the dangerous places and will happily die a martyr’s death. There is no stopping people like that — they want to be heros. And if they’d only risk their own necks then I’m fine with it, but when they bring their families into it (especially children who have no choice) I get more uncomfortable.
If they purposely go to a place where there is a high chance they will get killed for their beliefs, then there is not much we can do. But we can all support the idea of religious freedom, and do what we can to help those who are involuntary victims of religious persecution.
One way is supporting Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch. Feel free to recommend other charities that fight for human rights.
I’m not sure if I agree that they “want” to be heros. I think they are truly deluded into believing that this is a calling.
The example that was always given to me (and I, in fact used it myself) was if someone was drowning, wouldn’t you try to save them? I don’t think there is a need to be a hero, but a need to help others, albeit for an invisible person. They truly feel this is the right thing to do.
Not saying I agree with it, especially when they take their families into dangerous situations. It’s just sad.
And BTW…Kim Il-Sung is waaaaaaay crazy….
Harks back to early Christianity. That’s why there’s so much emphasis on Jesus suffering in the gospels that made it into the New Testament; Christians had to identify with the persecution in the book.
Anyway, North Korea can’t last much longer. They keep going the way they are and America, Japan and South Korea will have no choice but to land on them hard.
I thought Japan didn’t had an army, has it?
As far as I know, there is not oil, there are not strategic prime raws in Korea.
Probably crisis period will pass before another republican being on the withe house.
Conclusion: If they keep showing his big weapons from time to time, with no further menace, they are pretty safe.
Unless we can absolutely interdict any nuclear missiles from North Korea I don’t see us attacking anytime soon. He effectively holds Asia hostage.
While I agree the persecution of ANY faith is wrong, there is something very telling in this story:
“She was accused of distributing Bibles, SPYING for South Korea and the United States and helping to ORGANIZE DISSIDENTS.”
There, that makes it a little easier to read. See, there are 3 charges listed, 2 of which are state crimes in just about every country in the world. Spying and organizing dissidents are capitol offenses in many countries. Here in the US, during times of war, spies are executed. We may not like it, we may not agree with it, but it happens.
The Radical Religious Right has seized on the “distributed bibles” part of this story and are trying to use it as an example of how badly xtians are persecuted. Since North Korea does allow 4 churches, I doubt seriously that she was executed just for distributing bibles.
Sometimes, you have to un-spin something to understand the story.
You can’t be serious, can you?
The BBC is hardly the religious right, and they understand that this is clearly an example of religious persecution.
The communist country, the world’s most closed society, views religion as a major threat.
Only the founder of the country, Kim Il-sung, and his son, Kim Jong-il, may be worshipped, in mass public displays of fervour.
Give me a break. Get your head out of your rear end. This is as much a hate crime as any of the posts Daniel makes about fundamentalists who hate gays and lesbians.
I’m with you BR. Lisa Ling’s sister is being held there for the same trumped up charge of spying. Spying seems to be the standard charge for many dissidents/outsiders/foreigners in just about any communist country.
Do you think it likely that a spy would also be a Bible-hander-outer?
Given the country in which she was arrested and executed, I think it’s much more likely than not that she was a missionary who had charges trumped up against her. If she was South Korean, she’s an easy target for such an accusation, don’t you think? “Organizing dissidents” is even more thinly veiled.
Personally my advice for Christians is to not go anywhere near places like North Korea, but the fervent ones won’t listen. They feel a need to take their message to the dangerous places and will happily die a martyr’s death. There is no stopping people like that — they want to be heros. And if they’d only risk their own necks then I’m fine with it, but when they bring their families into it (especially children who have no choice) I get more uncomfortable.
As a point of clarity, my understanding is that the majority of the people who are being executed are native North Koreans. Details are fuzzy, though, and it’s unclear exactly what is happening. Even the BBC report doesn’t make it clear if this particular woman was North Korean or a foreign missionary. Anyway, given your advice to Christian missionaries, I thought it was worth noting that it’s not just missionaries who are threatened.
Agree. Which is why I say we should be helping people who are stuck in these situations involuntarily.
Absolutely.
Just when you think that we have accepted the modern age….you hear about such primitive actions. Makes me very sad that this type of thing still occurs.
It should be noted that, in a society that “views any form of alternative social organisation as a competitor for its own, religion-like ideology,” is necessarily going to equate passing out Bibles (and other forms of evangelism) and “organizing dissidents”. The words of Jesus advocate an essential withdrawal from state allegiance. I won’t say that North Korea is ancient Rome, but they’re similar in that any “religious” activity is a part of civic duty; the two cannot be divorced. Rome thought that Christians’ withdrawal from the state posed threat to imperial stability, because an increasing population of people who believe in the equality of all humans is scary to a dictator. North Korea is making the same mistake. Then again, maybe it’s not a mistaken point, just an atrocious response.
I’m just as interested to see what is going to happen now as I would be if Nero had been testing nukes.
Do any of us really need to be seeing a picture of a half-naked Kim Jong-Il?
Do you think it will help it rain? (Especially in Texas where we’re experiencing a hellacious drought?)
Of course one stock question from theists is “if you’re atheist, why aren’t you in North Korea”? Hitchens made up a whole false persona in order to get in, and as Sam Harris said more generally, North Korea’s problem is not that it’s too reasonable. Doing what we can to draw public attention to what’s going on in this Orwellian nightmare of a place will go a long way to disarming goofy theist questions about the supposed evil effects of atheism. Here’s my entry on my political blog:
http://tompainesclubhouse.blogspot.com/2009/07/did-you-see-mike-kim-on-daily-show.html
North Korea isn’t an atheist nation. They’re encouraged to worship, as long as the god they pray to is Kim Il-sung. He’s just like the Xian god. “Worship no others before me”. Only we can actually prove Kim Il-sung exists.
Heh.
National Socialism, Communism under Stalin or the Khmer Rouge, North Korean Juche, etc etc, are basically religions. Authoritarian leadership, “us vs them” solidarity, dogmatic ideology, suppression of inquiry and dissent, sacred text…
“Only the founder of the country, Kim Il-sung, and his son, Kim Jong-il, may be worshipped, in mass public displays of fervour.”
My irony sense tingles.
Anyway, it’s rather obvious that they don’t mind worship, as long as it’s the rulers being worshiped. IOW, they view religion as a threat to their political power, it’s got nothing to do with secularism . How long until FOX and others box us atheistic secularists with this wackos?
/preemptive spin defense
For those who haven’t seen this -
Welcome To North Korea
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FJ6E3cShcVU
It is horrifying…
THanks for that, Michael. I’d not seen it before – I hope theists can watch it and see how indoctrination from childhood taught them to believe in a false divinity just as it does for North Koreans.
Daniel, you don’t have to buy in this ‘atheists made massacres too’ stuff.
NK Communism has all the elements that we loathe and despise in a religion: truths that cannot be questioned, worship of an infallible divine being, brainwashing.
They lack a creation myth, but in practice they are a lot closer to the big monotheism than other ‘religions’ (say Buddhism) are.
We are not ‘atheists’ anymore than Xians are ‘Invisible Pink Unicorn Deniers’ (Courtesy of Thunderf00t, can’t find the video link right now).
If we are defined through a negative, it’s easy to stick us with any asshole that happens not to believe in god.
We are skeptics, rationalists, ‘freethinkers’ if we want to splurge, and any of those would be the slightest compatible with the absolute veneration of a leader and a system such as those in the ‘communist’ countries.
Actually they are getting closer and closer to having a creation myth.
Kim Jung-Il’s birth story was on the level with the Christmas stories when it comes to the level of absurdity. ^_^
I think if G. Orwell had known this he would have been rolling in his grave. Eventually NK will tell their children that their leader invented steam engine someday.
I have no hesitation to say that North Korea already has their own state religion – worshiping of the two Kims.
I lived in China for many years, and I’ve heard about the fervent and religion-like worship in my country before the 1980s from my parents. I know almost exactly how it was like in that kind of society. Although in many aspects, China is not what it used to be, there are still some characteristics in that kind of society remaining. Which is sad, actually. :(
Even in those turbulent times, my dad has acquired the capability to be skeptical. He did something like those North Koreans at that time: listening to ‘enemy radio’, attempted to swim across the border (failed though). I think I really should thank him, who guided me to become a scientific skeptic. I know now that it is not any particular religion itself we are going against, it is the notion of believing without evidence, and the teaching of this notion to the congregation, that we are fighting against.
I don’t mind people calling me an ‘atheist’, but I think that’s just one small label attached to a person, and it does not say much. It is not necessarily a relabeling, but I would rather like using the word “sceptic”.