President Bush defended the awarding Wednesday of the nation’s top civilian honor to the Dalai Lama, the exiled religious leader of Tibet, and said that he will challenge Chinese leaders to support religious freedom during the award ceremony.
“I admire the Dalai Lama a lot. … I support religious freedom,” Bush said in a short-notice press conference at the White House.
Bush also said he had personally spoken with Chinese President Hu Jintao to say he would be attending the Congressional Gold Medal ceremony for the Dalai Lama, and Bush said the Chinese would be better off having diplomatic relations with the Tibetan leader.
“I have consistently told the Chinese that religious freedom is in their nation’s interest. I’ve also told them that I think it’s in their interest to meet with the Dalai Lama and will say so at the ceremony today in Congress,” Bush said.
Freedom of religion may be in the best interest of the people of China, but it is [b]not[/b] in the best interests of the people who run China. Like every dictator and strongman, they fear a free people who have more to live for than the government.
YBIC,
Phil Snyder
I did some business in China many years ago, and have just put online my account of same. [url=http://www.vulcanhammer.info/china/10.php]My reflections on the whole subject of religion in China are part of that and are here[/url].
Religious freedom won’t come to China until the government sees the benefit of it for China. With the rabid secularists running about these days, the West is sending a decidedly ambivalent message about whether religious freedom is a good thing or not.
A man who justifies torture by his state awarding a medal to a man who defies the injustice of another state. There’s got to be irony somewhere in here.
I’d like to see Mr. Bush come out strongly for religious freedom in places like, oh, I don’t know, Saudi Arabia. But I guess he’s currently too busy urging Congress to not tell the truth about the Armenian Genocide.
It’s all about our “allies.”
–John
Let God Arise
Sadly Athanasius, you’re all too right. We are worried about the Saudi government falling and being taken over by something much worse. But that’s worldly thinking and not faith. We should speak the truth and let events sort themselves out.
Who knows, maybe God might bless us in ways our realpolitic thinking can’t forsee.