Tag Archives: Religion

Burn yourself to go to paradise

Nationality: USA
Age: 20
Occupation: Student
Residence: San Francisco, California
Performance Date: 4/12/13
Primary Language: English

Informant: “My parents told me that a man once told a girl that if she burned herself, she would go to heaven. And that’s what she did. She burned herself. She was saved, but she’s was like deformed. And then she died. It was all because of that religion and the cult. That’s why my parents don’t want me to believe in religion.”

Me: “Have you heard this story from anyone else?”

Informant: “Yes. My friends’ moms know about it too!”

Me: “Do you know what religion it was that caused people to burn themselves?”

Informant: “It was that exercise cult thingy.”

Me: “How does that make you feel? Do you believe in religion?”

Informant: “Any religion that makes you burn yourself is bad. It is not real. It’s… bad. Just bad. I don’t believe in religion because my mom and dad told me that it’s bad.”

Analysis: Through research discovered that the informant was talking about the Falun Gong practictioners and the incident in TianAnMen Square in 2001. Falun Gong is a spiritual exercise, similar to Taichi. In 2001, a group of five people (including one twelve year old girl) set themselves on fire in the middle of TianAnMen square. The incident caused major controversy in China.

This retelling of the story of the self-immolation incident in Tiananmen square is an example of an event improperly portrayed by the media, and through word of mouth became a warning against all religion. In reality, there is no evidence that the people who participated in that incident practiced Fa Lun Gong, according to the article.

China has always been a relatively atheist country. During Mao Ze Dong’s reign, he did an attack on the Four Olds, including old culture, which included religion. At the time, the primary religion of choice in China was Buddhism, but with the drive for “New Thought”, many young revolutionists abandoned religion. This may have contributed to the informant’s parents’ thoughts on religion being bad, as they would’ve been teenagers at the time of the Cultural Revolution in 1976.

Annotation: http://en.minghui.org/cc/88/

Fa Lun Gong Burning

Chinese/Taiwanese Custom of Praying at a Temple for Success in Exams

Nationality: Taiwanese
Age: 19
Occupation: USC student, majoring in electrical engineering, minoring in computer science
Residence: Los Angeles, California
Performance Date: April 7, 2012
Primary Language: Chinese
Language: English, French

“China does not have one unified religion. The closest things we have are Buddhism and Daoism, but they tend to stick in their own temples and mountains. So unless you’re a very firm believer in it–it doesn’t trickle down to the normal population. What does happen is that Chinese gods are very practical. The general philosophy is that it doesn’t matter who you believe in, it doesn’t matter what kind of person you are, if you step in a temple, you offer your money, you pray, the gods will answer. So, the gods aren’t creators or great beings to be worshipped, they are beings with super powers that you trade with. Basically, we have what is called ‘paper money.’ You buy the paper money from the temple, and then you burn the paper, and you offer fruit, food, or whatever, to the gods, and the gods give you the good fortune that you want. So, we don’t pray at nights before we eat or before we sleep, we don’t call to God for help, but if we’re, for example, going to an exam, it’s very typical in Asia to take your sons or your daughters to a temple and pray to the gods before the exam starts to pray to the gods for a successful exam.”

Q. Have you ever done that?

A. My parents have taken me to temples when I was little.

Q. Was that a meaningful experience for you?

A. I never really believed that that would help, but since my parents took me there, I prayed. I’d say, “God, give me a good exam result.”

Q. Is the practice of taking kids to temples before exams very common?

A. Well, the temples get a burst of popularity every time final exams come around.

Q. On what other occasions do people go to the temples?

A. People also go on New Year, to have a good year, before you start a job, after you buy a new house. Also on the Day of the Dead, the day we honor our dead, a lot of people go to the temples. And some people come more than others; my family goes very rarely because we’re not very religious, so we go once every month or two.

Q. You said that you don’t believe that going to the temples actually helps. Do your parents believe in it?

A. They are agnostics. They take the Pascal’s gamble approach. If it works, it works, and we pay the money, it’s good. If it doesn’t work, well, we paid a little money, it’s not actually that much, and it’s an experience for our children, so that’s fine. They’re very busy people, and visiting the temple takes time, so we don’t do it very often.

Q. Can you talk more about what the experience of going there is like?

A. Temples are usually very noisy, very loud and crowded. Unlike Western cathedrals—I’m not very much into religion, but I love cathedrals because of the architecture—which are serene, and you walk into them and feel awed by God, in Chinese temples, it’s loud, they’re sort of a social gathering. Also, temples are markets—they’re markets with great food. Temple food is good. You know how in the New Testament, they describe Jesus as being very angry at the peddlers who were in the Temple, and he flipped their stalls? There’s a section in the New Testament where Jesus goes to the Temple and he gets very angry at the peddlers for defiling a sacred place. But this is the opposite. In the temples, you’re supposed to have that kind of people. If a temple doesn’t have peddlers, it means that it’s not very popular, and if it’s not very popular, then its gods aren’t very good. So a temple that is empty and sort of quiet and serene is a bad thing. Temples are supposed to be very loud, and there’s supposed to be smoke everywhere from the incense. That’s the Chinese temple.

There are these things, I’m not sure what they’re called, but they’re two crescent-shaped pieces of wood that are painted red. They look like slices of oranges. And you’re supposed to throw them on the ground. You’re supposed to throw a pair of them on the ground. And how they land will tell you how’s your luck. And you’ll hear those things clattering against the ground the whole time. Sometimes you’ll buy a little bag full of rice that’s supposed to be blessed, and you keep them as a sort of talisman or amulet for good luck. You can buy one for the kind of thing you wanted good luck from. So, if you want success in exams, you can buy a success in exam one, if you want success in love, you can buy a success in love one. It’s a very business-oriented thing. There are certain temples, even until now, which are very sacred and which treat money as less of an issue, like the Shaolin Temple and the Daoist temples. But your average temple—they all worship multiple gods, and it’s just whatever god’s most popular in the area. Actually, speaking of the Shaolin Temple, which is very famous for its martial artists—they are said to be the most business-oriented temple now. Shaolin martial arts have spread all over the world by virtue of them being very business-oriented. The head monk of Shaolin no longer sits in his room praying, he goes all over the world on private jets for business purposes.

Q. Does that mean converting people?

A. No, they’re not converting people to the religion. They are not encouraged, nor are they motivated to convert people to their religion. But they welcome people to come and practice Shaolin martial arts, and they get paid quite a bit of money for it.

Analysis: This tradition of praying at temples for success in exams displays a way that religion has adapted to fit people’s present-day concerns, pressures, and needs.

The Priest and the Cat

Nationality: American
Age: 19
Occupation: Student
Performance Date: 4/19/12
Primary Language: English

Transcribed from interview with my informant:

“There’s this priest. He goes outside one day, he sees that there’s a cat in a tree. Of course being a priest and a good man he wants to get the cat down from the tree, but for some reason he decides he’s going to go down the most cartoon-y route possible.”

“His neighbor has a pick-up truck, so what he does is he borrows his neighbor’s pick-up truck and then ties a rope to one end–the first end of the rope he ties to the tree, the second end to the back of the truck. Now he thinks he’s going to be able to bend the tree down just far enough that he’ll be able to reach up to the branch, get the cat, and put it safely on the ground.”

“However, the rope snaps midway through- the rope snaps midway through, the tree shoots back upwards and the cat goes flying into the sky. The priest searches all over for the cat, never finds it. Then about two weeks later he’s at the grocery store. He sees this woman who is buying cat food and he knows this woman hates cats, so he asks her ‘Why are you buying cat food?'”

“She says ‘Well you’re not going to believe this but the other day I was talking to my little girl. She said she wanted a cat very badly. I said to her you can have a cat when God gives you one. So she went outside, went on the ground, and started praying. Then out of nowhere a cat flew out of the sky and landed in front of her.'”

My informant heard this story from his Catholic priest in Nantucket, who would apparently end every sermon with some sort of a joke. He couldn’t remember the particular sermon this story was attached to, but suspected there was some thematic connection between the above narrative and the sermon.

This particular joke is interesting in that at its root, it concerns the actions of a priest being mistaken for divine intervention, perhaps speaking to some concerns of the Catholic faith. Notably, the priest was unaware of the consequences of what he did, so the point might be that providence governs our actions whether we realize it or not.

Pious Man on the Roof

Nationality: American
Age: 19
Occupation: Student
Performance Date: 4/19/12
Primary Language: English

From interview with informant:

“So there was this one day this very pious man got trapped on top of his house during a flood. And then there was–a rowboat came by, and the guy rowing the rowboat was like, ‘Hey, get in the rowboat, you know, I’ll save you.’ And he was like ‘No thanks, you know, I’m a religious guy, I pray every day, I go to church. God we’ll save me. It’s awesome. You know, I’m good. God’s got me covered.'”

“Then a jet-ski comes by, like a guy on a jet ski, and the guy on the jet ski goes ‘Hey dude, get on the jet ski, survive. We’ll, you know, we’ll get out of here, get to safe ground.’ And he’s like ‘Uh, you know, uh, I’m a Christian, it’s cool. God loves me, he takes care of me. Jesus loves me. I go to church every Sunday, I’ll be fine.'”

“Then another guy comes by in a helicopter and this, like, safety patrol team is like getting people like airlifted out and he’s like ‘No, I’m good helicopter, it’s fine, God will save me.’

“And then he drowns. And he gets up to heaven and he talks to God and he goes ‘God, why didn’t you save me, why did you let that happen to me?’ And God’s like, ‘I sent you a rowboat, a jet ski, and a helicopter.”

He then briefly reflected:

“The priest who told it to me said like, that was like a joke priests invented to like, sort of inspire religious faith and, you know, God can only help so much, or some crap like that. Like God can only help those who help themselves.”

I agree pretty much entirely with that interpretation. I have no idea if that joke began with priests or not, but it certainly might have. I’ve definitely come across this piece a few times over the years, so I suspect it’s a fairly common example of religious humor.

 

Body of Christ

Nationality: Irish/Italian
Age: 20
Occupation: student
Residence: Los Angeles, from King of Prussia, Pennsylvania
Performance Date: 4/18/2012
Primary Language: English

My mother was told – and believed- that if she bit the uh Eucharist wafer or whatever, it would bleed forever and that you would drown in the blood. Like it would just fill your stomach. I guess you wouldn’t drown, I don’t know what would happen if your stomach was just forever filled with blood, you’d probably get sick.

 

My informant was told this by his mother who heard it at church as a girl. What’s interesting is that this could have multiple purposes. Maybe another kid told it to her just to scare her within a religious setting as a form of children folklore backlash against an establishment and ritual associated with parents. Perhaps she was told this by an adult who believed that biting the communion wafer was disrespectful, because it represents the body of Christ and biting it might represent mutilating it, thus s/he scared my informants mother into not biting it.