Letters to the Editor
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Dear Humans
That's it, you suck. I'm done with you and will fling a comet at your asses this year. I'm done.
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Gay Ghost Marriage?
It seems an obvious solution, but China's problem of unhappily single dead bacchelors could be easily solved by legalizing gay marriage and simply marrying the dead guys off to each other. That or simply introduce undead polyandry, marrying one bride off to multiple grooms.
Of course this is all probably too sensible and begs the question of why the dead need the living to arrange marriages at all. If the living have to get involved, just have a medium do a speed-dating seance and let the dead take it from there. Surely there are at least a few priests in the Chinese hells.
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I admit I'm surprised at this respone to the shortage of women
killing them off when they are already scarce seems a pretty irrational response.
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I object
to the statement
"considering the spate of sex-selective abortions as a result of the country's one-child limit."
The sex-selective abortions are because males are more valued than females and occured before there was a one-child limit.
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Sorry to disappoint, Kevin
Ghost marriage in China takes multiple forms. The practice I saw in Taiwan involved marrying a live man to a deceased unmarried woman. While the variation of marrying a deceased man to deceased woman is a new one on me, and looking for such a woman is even newer, I can at least explain what was originally behind the standard version I mentioned:
In China traditionally, when a woman marries, she leaves the family she was born into, and becomes a member of the family of her husband. This is an important point, because it is the husband's family that will maintain her spirit on the family altar, that is, look after her after she is dead. This cannot be done by her birth family, she is no one's ancestor there, and it would be close to admitting the end of a lineage line. That is the worst of all possible fates, because Confucius labelled having one's lineage die out as a punishment, so that would punish the family's ancestors. The Confucian lineage thing is why the Chinese take having a son as important to an extreme.
So if a woman died before she was married, her family would put money in a red envelope and put it by the side of the road, and wait in the bushes. When an unmarried man came along and saw the envelope, they would jump out and beseech him to marry the dead daughter and accept the red envelope as dowry. The ceremony would be held, and the woman's things, and picture would go on the man's family shrine. He would be free to marry or not afterwards. The woman would be worshipped and her spirit would be fed on holidays, and someone would burn paper money for her, etc.
So a gay ghost marriage wouldn't really do anything to solve the problem.
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The primary reason sex selective abortions occur is because there is a one child limit
before that they would just keep going until they had enough boys.
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Barbarians?
For the last 5,000 years or so, the Chinese have been calling the rest of us barbarians.
It's time that they stopped.
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I'm trying to get my head around this
China has a surplus of men. Where a commodity (women) is scarce someone will do crimes to supply those who have money and demand.
But why in the name of all that's holy would a murdered corpse be worth more than a live, breathing woman?
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Remember, if you believe this ghost marriage stuff is bullshit (and it is),
then you have prima facie evidence that all supernatural beliefs are utter bullshit. All of them.
And they are.
The sooner you people get on board with atheism the sooner we can fix all the problems of this world caused directly by beliefs in the supernatural. Plus, you can sleep in on Sunday mornings.
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Bride Price versus Dowry
Ondelette,
Interesting to hear. I hadn't known the full details, but there's obviously a discrepancy of custom here: Taiwan has a dowry set-up, where the groom is basically paid to take the daughter off the family's hands. The murders, however, were taking place in an area that has a bride-price system going. The guy who originally bought the woman intended to resell her as a living bride, only finding that she was more valuable as a dead one. You can't simultaneously have a bride-price and a dowry, unless it's some sort of rebate or gift-with-purchase thing going.
Of course, the moment you make corpses valuable, this sort of money-making scheme crops up. In Edinburgh a couple centuries ago, the bodies were wanted for medical studies, leading to this rhyme:
Up the close and down the stair,
In the house with Burke and Hare.
Burke’s the butcher, Hare’s the thief
Knox, the man who buys the beef.
Seems like it needs a new verse...
Let us find a bride for you--
Wedding planners, Yang and Liu!
Yang takes money, Liu is smart,
Li preserves and serves the tart.
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This is insanity
But the earlier poster is right, so are all supernatural beliefs.
How much impact did the Maoists really have on Chinese society, if this sort of thing still happens?
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Perspective
Well,
This seems to be:
* Very unusual
* Conducted in a rural village
* Illegal under Chinese law and will be punished.
Therefore drawing any sort of conclusion from all of this is akin to saying that Shawn Hornbeck's kidnapping is clearly an indicator that America's legalization of abortion has caused a child shortage which has become so extreme that look! People are stealing other people's kids.
No, I don't believe that to be true. But people are drawing some pretty wild conclusions from a single instance.
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other cultures
i have totally lost interest in these cultures. even ones that seem to have such wonderful understanding ofthe spiritual seem to have behaviors that are bizarre. this one is just so ridiculous that one wonders if the prejudices the west felt toward these others were justified. no more apologies from this westerner. the one child policy seems to appeal to the left so much. but it has created a horrible situation for the future. somehow the states business here never seems to bother them, but wiretapping does? anthropology is dead as a doornail. the chinese, the indians -- they have their mean side. practices are no longer explainable by anthro-psycho babble. good riddance.