Posted on 07/30/2007 3:09:20 AM PDT by TigerLikesRooster
Thanks AdmSmith.
If you combine Catholics and Protestants, South Korea’s Christian population passed the 50% mark a few years ago. This makes them the second predominantly Christian nation in Asia, after the Philippines.
Is yet another military coup within the realm of possibility? It's happened before.
The only way to negotiate with this type of extortion is to publicly execute two Taliban prisoners for every one of their captives they kill......
They need to send in the Korean Army to “negotiate” with the Towel Heads!
This incident is not going to end well. Muslims - particularly those on the fundamentalist side - have no use for Christians - even less so for missionaries, consider them heathens and want them eliminated.
The mullahs won’t blink an eye and their disciples won’t lose any sleep, when it comes to having the Koreans executed - unless they think they can gain something from keeping them alive - either money, a prisoner exchange or political capital.
Best info I have on that subject is from the CIA World Book of Facts, with census data from 1995:
Christian 26.3% (Protestant 19.7%, Roman Catholic 6.6%), Buddhist 23.2%, other or unknown 1.3%, none 49.3% (1995 census)
How few years, I guess, is the question. They would have to have about doubled in the past 12 years... Possible, I suppose.
Yes, that information for the CIA handbook is out of date. However, I was overoptimistic myself. Churches like those of Dr. Paul Yong-gi Cho were growing so fast in the 1990s, I thought they would have crossed the line by now.
I just checked the 2006 edition of Microsoft Encarta. According to it, South Korea is 41% Christian, 16% indigenous beliefs (which I assume means ancestor worship and homegrown sects like Tongkhak), 15% Buddhist, 11% Confucian, 2% nonreligious and 15% other. Accurate figures are hard to come by because the Koreans take the same spiritual attitude as the Chinese; they consider it okay to belong to more than one religion at the same time.
“I just checked the 2006 edition of Microsoft Encarta. According to it, South Korea is 41% Christian...”
That is cool! I suspect that the toughness of ROK Commandos hasn’t decreased because of it, however. The Talibunnies might want to keep an eye on their backtrail if they really do this. Or even just keep talking about it.
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