- Joined
- Oct 30, 2014
- Messages
- 36,768
- Points
- 113
Taiping Rebellion - Hong Xiuquan was born into a poor family in southern China. In 1837, he fails the imperial civil service examinations-- his only hope of getting ahead in life-- and has a nervous breakdown. Long story short, he reads some pamphlets from Portuguese missionaries, gets some freaky visions, decide's he's Jesus's younger brother, rounds up some followers (known as the God Worshippers), and launches a rebellion against the Qing Dynasty that results in the deaths of over 20 million people.
This Hong chap sounds pretty much like the chink version of muhammad, who decided that he was some prophet after reading bits and pieces of gnostic and jewish religion, and getting high on local weed. The only difference was that Hong's rebellion was finally put down while muhammad won his own local wars during his lifetime. Hong and his merry men were always referred to as Taipings, not christians. So the person you quoted from also didn't know shit about chink history.
Initially, the followers of Hong Xiuquan were called God Worshippers. Hong's faith was inspired by visions he reported in which the Christian Lord greeted him in Heaven. Hong had earlier been in contact with Protestant missionaries and read the Bible. Officially, the Taiping Heavenly Kingdom endorsed Hong Xiuquan's own version of Christianity combined with elements of Chinese folk religion, the "restored faith" in Shingdu and some other native beliefs. Although Hong's followers led the Kingdom, there were also adherents of Buddhism, Chinese folk religion and other religious traditions native to China.
Hong developed a literalist understanding of the Bible, producing a set of his own annotations. He rejected the doctrine of the Trinity, saying "God is the Father and embodies myriads of phenomena; Christ is the Son, who was manifest in the body... The Wind of the Holy Spirit, God, is also a Son... God is one who gives shapes to things, molds things into forms, who created heaven and created earth, who begins and ends all things, yet has no beginning or end himself..." and "God and the Savior are one."[19]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Taiping_Heavenly_Kingdom