**Disclaimer: This journal is NOT about taking sides in Israel-Palestine. It’s about observing how religon shapes the way people in the West discuss such conflicts**

I've been in Europe for three years now. Cultural shock was supposed to be the thing that hit me the moment I stepped off the plane — "more open, more free, more developed, more tolerant,", that sort of thing. These aren't necessarily true in terms of lived experience, and they did produce a series of reactions ranging from surprise to "hm, that actually makes sense." But without question, the most interesting thing has been the people.

When I started making friends and having the kind of conversations you only have once you feel close enough — the kind that move from each other's personal lives to structural problems in each other's societies — I discovered something. It's been a cliché on the Chinese internet for ages ("baizuo(white left)," lol), but I didn't truly grasp the weight of it until I experienced it firsthand:

The Western liberal/progressive atheist and the Chinese understanding of atheism are not on the same frequency at all.

This is my biggest cultural shock. And its sharpest point of exposure has been discussions about Israel-Palestine. I'll get to that, but let me lay out the background first.


I. Religious Life as I've Observed It

In Europe, the religious communities I've encountered fall roughly into two categories: one type is open to outsiders, warm in a way that goes beyond just handling tourists, genuinely welcoming you to learn, with rich programming. These are mostly Catholic. The other type is more insular, especially after I introduce myself as "a Chinese materialist atheist who's interested in religion and wants to understand how believers think." These more community-oriented organizations seem to be mostly Protestant.

China has Christian communities too — Catholic-adjacent churches centered on physical parishes, decentralized networks closer to Protestantism that operate in a gray zone in rural areas, and things like rainbow churches. But these people generally identify themselves as situated within a sacred order; their self-experience carries an element of "everything is ordained." This seemingly fundamentalist quality was by no means absent in my encounters with Western believers — Muslims and Indians especially so, which made them come across as more self-assured than Christians.

Both of these categories of religious community are ones I can understand, because they match my impression of religion — what I experience in reality lines up more or less with what I've read in books.


II. The Real Shock: Secular Christianity

My baseline is Chinese materialism. I have a strong interest in religion, but my goal is understanding, so I inevitably form my own ideas. My approach was a bit opportunistic: rather than bringing these observations directly to religious communities, I took them to people who seemed more secularized — liberal/progressive types. In practice, this meant university classmates and the kind of people you most easily meet.

These discussions are why I find these people interesting, and why I'm writing this journal.

The topics are pointed. Attitudes toward small animals ("Chinese people eat dogs, the Chinese government does nothing about cat abuse"), attitudes toward children ("Asians don't like kids"), many stereotypes about Asia and China are actually reasonable examinations of the roots of Chinese culture. But the most structural and most "hot-button" of all is Israel.

When we actually tried to identify root causes, I framed the issue as a religious conflict between Jews and Christians/Muslims, and the problem of Western colonial order is simply the most convenient channel through which this conflict manifests within the framework of modernity. Between Jews and the Christian world, and between Jews and the Islamic world, there exists a long-standing asymmetric religious-historical relationship, one with clear characteristics of structural oppression. Up to this point, my interlocutors could follow.

The next inference is this: Jews occupy a position of systemic oppression by both the Christian and Islamic worlds. The systems constructed by Jesus and the Prophet of Islam (or their imitators) possess no sacred authority whatsoever — meaning Christianity and Islam are, from their very foundations, built upon the negation of Judaism and, by extension, the Jewish people. The absence of sacred authority is not the problem in itself; the problem is that their construction of sacred authority depends on the repudiation of Judaism. The mechanisms of oppression differ: Christian anti-Judaism escalated from theological negation all the way to genocide; Islam more often fixed Jews in an institutionalized secondary status through the dhimmi system. But regardless of the pathway, the underlying logic of supersessionist theology is shared: Jewish revelation is declared incomplete or corrupted, and the very existence of the Jewish people constitutes a challenge to the legitimacy of the new order. Different mechanisms, same structural negation. Of course, an exclusivist tendency exists within the Jewish people themselves, but it is rendered harmless by the sheer scale of Christianity and Islam.

At this point, the discussion's core becomes: is religion ontological?

In my view, yes. Sacred order is ontological from within its own framework. Christianity and Islam transcend the nation-state, society, and ethnicity as organizing constructs. Nazism could be explicitly bound to a state apparatus — overthrow the Third Reich and you're done. But you cannot overthrow God. And even from a moral standpoint, the critical thinking route has not freed Westerners from the moral inheritance of God. Liberals have rejected the ontological label of religion, but they don't seem to reject the influence of religion's ontological premises. The debate in this journal is too typical not to reference: https://www.furaffinity.net/journal/11308895/

To be clear, I deny the legitimacy of God and God's order — because I am a materialist atheist. But that doesn't mean I deny that the effects of a God-constructed-by-humans order are real. A system doesn't need to "actually" possess ontological authority, it only needs to produce ontological-level social effects in practice, and then it must be analyzed as ontological.


III. The Question That Makes Them Most Uncomfortable

In some cases, the other person gets angry and refuses to continue the discussion. The trigger is usually this: I push the framework into more concrete questions, such as the structural relationship between Israel and the surrounding Islamic world, and whether, from an Israeli or even a de-religionized perspective, the statement "Israel has the right to defend itself" has any legitimacy.

To be clear, I'm not approaching this from within the framework of modern state jurisprudence or international relations.

Muslims and Christians of many denominations are, from birth, embedded in a system that claims ontological authority, and the very existence of that system constitutes structural oppression against the Jewish people. The problem cannot be reduced to Israel, or to any single modern political entity (Israel is first and foremost a victim of structural oppression). Nor does it lie with any individual Christian or Muslim (who had no choice). The problem is that sacred order itself shapes identity into an ontological attribute — and I do not believe that modernity, meaning Enlightenment and liberal values, has truly provided a framework for escaping this structure. As an example: Israel's own founding narrative is equally rooted in sacred order; the "Promised Land" is itself an ontological claim. But the distinction is that within this three-way structure, the supersessionist theologies of Christianity and Islam fundamentally negate the legitimacy of Judaism, while the reverse does not hold.

Perhaps this is ultimately a matter of degree. But reality — especially after the industrial age and the emergence of international order — offers no answer to the question of "how do you compensate for structural oppression." The debt can never be repaid.

I simultaneously support resistance against structural oppression and oppose wars of aggression. But Israel, the surrounding Arab world, the Jewish and Palestinian peoples, and even the spectating Christian world — none of them have exited the sacred order. This isn't a question of who is right and who is wrong. It's a predicament in which everyone is trapped.


IV. My Real Confusion

I am not taking sides for Israel or Palestine. This is Western life, not mine. My position aligns with the Chinese government's: Israel is an important partner for China in the Middle East; the fact that the Palestinian people have had to endure what they have endured is itself shocking and bewildering, and they deserve sympathy.

But here is my deepest confusion: why don't these people — who claim to have left religion behind — critique the abstract order of God itself?

If you want to resolve this issue that comes up at every party, shouldn't you first consider something more structural and fundamental? These people's impulse seems to be about who is the villain and the madman, who is the good guy and the oppressed, and who is more innocent. But why, when we discuss these questions, do we do so from such a flippant vantage point? What is it that compels them to pick sides between good and evil, rather than interrogating the conditions that produce the binary of good and evil in the first place? This is not the critical thinking I want to see.