Then, there were people trying to make up 'Confucius said' this, and 'Confucius said' that on TV and in the movies, but those were often comedians trying to imitate the tone of little brother Mr. Kong Jr. To many Westerners, religion was much, much more important in their everyday lives than religions for normal Easterners especially new Chinese to imagine. I was really amazed by the idea that for more than a millennium, most of the kings and queens of Europe, or that of the so called Christendom, thought of their countries' sovereignty belong to Jesus Christ personally. They viewed people outside of the Christendom as nothing but 'barbarians'. Therefore all of their pillage, looting, killings and torturing of the people outside of Christendom was justified as acting on behalf of their God, or as people made by God slaughtering animals or sinners in the eyes of their God. Since those crimes under the name of God seemed quite profitable, those folks continued their practice and even brought slavery to live within their realm of Christendom and into the new world. Later, even after those Europeans started advocating equalities and freedom amongst themselves, they still viewed other people who did not know Christianity as barbarians or creatures that were less of them. That idea of spreading something nicer and gospel like messages lasted even until this day, as today's American like to spread democracy all over the world. By saying that, I am not only demeaning this war on terror. If you watch enough Hollywood movies, you would see that Alexander the Great, Julius Caesar including the first Roman Empire -- the ancestor of many dictators to come -- Octavia was also portrayed as fighting for this ideal called 'freedom'. The lovely and innocent pre-school boy was scripted on the silver screen, in the warm and fuzzy American classic movie 'it's a wonderful life' as with a childhood ambition of exploring Africa and marrying four wives when he grow up. This is the concept of a 'perfect crime' that I didn't realize existed when living in the East. And the idea of a 'perfect crime' was quite frightening. We learned about 君子剑 and thought he was a pretty slick criminal. But since that criminal at least had his intentions and motives, no matter how deeply hidden, those intentions could be traced back by other people, therefore that crime was not so "perfect". The 'perfect crimes' are the crimes that are conducted without motives, such as serial killing. It could also be conducted out of noble intentions by generations of nice folks. I thought I did not see it in Chinese literatures before. But then after carefully thinking about it, maybe I have seen it in 狂人日记 as the author thought of everybody was killing others with Chinese traditional moral standards. Many people like to think China suffered longer under feudalism than Europe and the Americans. After learning the European history and looking around in USA, I am no longer sure about that. Outside of literature, it seemed like I have been seeing perfect crime all my life. History is a set of lies agreed upon, and I wonder why there are only scientific fictions about future, nobody like to call some of the history books as 'historic fictions' or 'archeological fictions'. People could very well be working diligently to deceive other people all the time, but never the less, majority of the people in the world would prefer to call 'honesty' a virtual. We see every Chinese emperor or empress absolutely forbid his or her subjects to cheat. But emperors and empresses also mandated their subjects to call them 'ten thousand year long live human beings' 万岁, 万岁, 万万岁. They would gladly punish people who do not lie to them with those words in greetings. What an irony? Through the hallo around those religious figures and looking at those decorations dotted with cross, there are many years of European or the Western history, which is no different from the many years of 仁义道德 in the Chinese history, I wonder why some Chinese nowadays think Western ideas and ism are superior than the ones that we used to learn. After all, the comparison, the inferiority or superiority are all imagined. Maybe, we just lacked imagination, there is truly nothing new under the sun. Several generations will go liberal and several generations will go conservative. Now I noticed that America is just about entering another cycle of conservatism, which had a name for it calling "neo-con". Churches, crosses, statue of Jesus or slogans such as "claim America for Jesus" are much more visible along interstate highways than in the years before 2001, which is as you know not long after the end of "dot com" bust and coincide with the event of 9/11." Wise Guy mentioned: "I actually attended a sermon recently out of loitering and idleness in US. I went to a Chinese community church and the sermon was presented by a recently famed preacher named 王志远 a former student activist and an aluminum from the graduate school where I attended. Oh that preacher used a lot of scientific evidence to prove the existence of God by the way. I felt sad for him that if a religion relies on another branch of knowledge to support it, the fact itself spoke for the weakening base of the faith." "Did you feel that he was a good student of science?" David asked. "No" Wise Guy replied. "You had your make up exam in theory of relativity. Maybe those preachers should spend more time catching up with the subject too. But when asked if I was touched by Jesus Christ, I actually stood up and tell them I was ready to listen to more gospel messages".
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