Slashdot Mirror
Detention Threat for Malaysian blogger
Malaysian Patriot writes "The Malaysian blogosphere is currently in uproar as one of their most famous bloggers, a political observer named Jeff Ooi, has been threatened with action under the country's draconian ISA (Internal Security Act) law which allows a person to be detained without trial if he is thought to threaten "national security". The whole problem started with a comment made by a reader of the blog. The comment is alleged to have been insulting of Islam. A national newspaper (whose editor has frequently been a target of Ooi's blog) took up the story and accused the blogger of insulting Islam, while Ooi in his defence states he warned (and later deleted) the offending commenter when he was alerted to it. Malaysian bloggers meanwhile are outraged that a blogger should be held responsible for comments made by readers. In the case of Ooi's blog, which attracts thousands of hits per day, it is logistically impossible for Ooi to read and moderate every comment made. The whole saga can be followed in Jeff Ooi's Screenshots blog."
Does anyone else favor the death penalty for anyone who uses the word (if you can call such an abomination by that name) "blogosphere"?
Personally I think the Rack is a suitible punishment. Alternately, hot irons under the fingernails, or forced repeated viewings of "Star Trek V".
Quidquid latine dictum sit, altum sonatur.
Why should people be allowed to insult Islam
Because we should be free to insult anything and anyone. I for one don't find that fact that hundreds of millions of people adhere to a religion that is philosophically stuck in the eighth century (minus all the scientific and cultural progress they were making back then), all that compelling a reason for its merit.
We would not put up with anyone insulting Christianity
What planet are you from?
When will you Atheists realise that your beliefs are just as much a religion as anthing you find in the Bible or the Quran?
On this we agree.
I suppose I'll get shot down in flames for pointing this out, but the levels of Islamophobia and general religious intolerance at slashdot are staggering.
Perhaps, but I do not need to be afraid that I or my children will be nuked, poisoned or infected by militant Buddhists, or Presbyterofascists, or Mormon suicide bombers, because they don't exist. There are no rabbis, or bishops issuing death warrants.
While there certainly have been Christian, et al, terrorists, they pale in significance by orders of magnitude to those of Islam. No bigotry in this statement, just facts.
You are in a maze of twisty little passages, all alike.
When will you Atheists realise that your beliefs are just as much a religion as anthing you find in the Bible or the Quran?
Refusing to believe in something until evidence is submitted is a matter of reason, not religion or faith.
I don't believe in God.
I don't believe in unicorns.
I don't believe in Santa Claus.
I don't believe in leprechauns.
I don't believe in Brahma.
I don't believe in alien abductions.
Chances are that you and I agree on all of those but the first. You probably also agree that the fact that you don't believe in unicorns is not a religious belief. Doesn't take a religious, faith-based belief to not believe in a stupid fairy tale, does it?
Now, please explain to me how the fact that I don't believe in unicorns is not a religious belief, but the fact that I don't believe in God is. Go ahead, I'm waiting.
ZFS: because love is never having to say fsck
That, dear sir, brings a tear to my eye. I was walking forlornly through the rain last week, throughly depressed at the evident truth that nobody knows how to troll anymore. And today, the sun is shining, the birds are singing, and you have shown me that there is at least one person who still practices the ancient art. Thank you.
Fascism trolls keeping me up every night. When I starts a preachin', he HITS ME WITH HIS REICH!
I may have left out some positions in the flame war. Feel free to add any that I missed.
-- $SIGNATURE
...under the country's draconian ISA (Internal Security Act) law which allows a person to be detained without trial if he is thought to threaten "national security"...
They have the Patroit Act too?
I find it disconcerting that all of the above comments focus on the "insulting Islam" part of the story, and not the "national security" preserving "Internal Security Act" being leveled at a political observer. With a focus like that, and the possibilty of the administration resposible for the Patriot Act being re-elected, don't be too surprised if it's an American blogger in 4 years time. Islam. Islam. Islam. Expose yourself to the word ten times daily until it ceases to trigger alarm bells, and images of turban-clad, gun-toting loonies.
You have a good point and you're absolutely right. However, in the 21st century how do we get past this stage without someone having to (or wanting to) annihilate the other?
When the state-of-the-art is a sword or a crossbow, it's one issue, but with weapons of mass destruction, it's a much scarier prospect.
You are in a maze of twisty little passages, all alike.
The Big Bang is a scientific model of the start of the universe. I could point out that it's a scientific theory that was created to explain observable facts, whereas God creating the universe doesn't explain anything. And if you start asking what created Big Bang, I'm afraid you're a bit behind the times there. The current conception just has space, and the space 'tilts' sideways and turns into time. (I don't pretend to understand how things can 'tilt' in no time, but the math works.)
However, that's not really the point at all, you're trying to trick people, even if you don't realize it. It doesn't matter if the Big Bang is wrong...in fact, even since the Big Bang was proposed, serious professional scientists have claimed that theory is inaccurate and/or meaningless.
It's not some end-all and be-all of science, it's nowhere near the level of General Relativity as a 'theory'. (Strictly speaking, there's not one theory there anyway, there are several.) Pretending it's some sort of religion for scientists is ignoring the fact a lot of them don't believe it, they just don't have anything better at the moment.
But that's still not the point. The point is that the people claiming the Big Bang theory is correct are doing so because that's what the evidence looks like. They say 'It looks like the entire universe used to be in the same place...what the heck could that have looked liked, and what happened to it to make it go everywhere?' Whereas the people saying 'God did it' are just being lazy.
If corporations are people, aren't stockholders guilty of slavery?
Why this distinction between beliefs based on "faith" and based on "reason"? Faith is not always blind. I have faith in my wife. Why? Because she has demonstrated to me in many ways that she is a faithful woman who loves me. Though we're not together during the business day, don't you think it is reasonable for me to trust her fidelity during the day, far less reasonable for me to suspect her of betraying me (at least in the absence of very serious evidence)?
The word "faith" has a number of different definitions; you are confusing the argument by using a different one than I am. You have evidence of your wife's faithfulness -- she has always been faithful to you in your presence, has professed her love to you on many occasions, and has done many other things to give you reason to believe in her faithfulness. There is no such evidence of the existence of God, so any belief in him must be a different sort of faith than what you describe.
I hope you can see that faith can be reasonable.
If it's reasonable (based on rational fact and evidence), it's not "faith" as generally defined in religious discussions.
Secondly, you wanted some evidence to be submitted about God. There are two kinds of evidence recognised by Christians: what can be seen in nature; and what has been specifically revealed by God in history.
I submit that there is nothing in nature which indicates the existence of God, nor has God at any point revealed his existence. I challenge you to submit evidence to the contrary.
Have you ever asked the questions that Science can't answer?
Of course. No one is claiming that science has all the answers.
Empiricism can observe the material world, and it can even propose laws which seem to describe the way the universe works. But it cannot say where these laws come from, or why they are so.
True. However, God doesn't make the situation any better.
Science: Question: Why does [system A] behave in [behavior B] fashion? Answer: We don't know.
Religion: Question: Why does [system A] behave in [behavior B] fashion? Answer: God wants it to work that way. Question: Why? Answer: We don't know.
All you've done is introduced one more unknowable thing and abstracted the answer one more step away.
Isn't it beautiful and elegant that such simple laws can describe such complexity? Isn't it still so unlikely, even given such laws, that they would produce you?
First, nobody has any idea how likely or unlikely it is -- we don't understand the processes that gave rise to life (and when we do, it will have been science, not religion, that answered the question). Second, even if it's fantastically unlikely, what does that have to do with anything? In a universe with fifty billion stars in each of a hundred trillion galaxies, the fact that something is "unlikely" still leaves room for it to happen trillions of times. And all we need is for it to have happened once -- and it obviously did, since here we are.
Have you ever investigated the historical man Jesus Christ, and assessed his claims and the claims of his followers? Reading the new testament of the bible is a good start: it's not very long, and you can't claim lack of evidence without having read it. It's also worth looking at historical analyses of it.
The historical man Jesus Christ is known from exactly four documents: the four Gospels. There are, to the best of my knowledge, no other known documents claiming first-hand knowledge of the man.
Tell me something: if I and three of my friends wrote stories claiming that we had seen a man perform great miracles, claim to be the son of Allah, and endorse Islam as the one true path, would you instantly trust me, discard all other religions, and follow Islam?
That is exactly what you done. Replace "Allah" with "God" and "Islam" with "Christianity" and you ha
ZFS: because love is never having to say fsck
It is their own weak belief, that some 'humans' think needs defending through coersion.
"Flyin' in just a sweet place,
Never been known to fail..."
by Tarek Heggy
Here's the complete series:
The man who founded Wahhabism was not a theologian but a proselyter who was determined to convert the faithful to his harsh brand of Islam. Intellectually close to the dialectical Islamic theologians who asserted the primacy of tradition (naql) over reason (aql), Mohamed ibn-Abdul Wahab was a disciple of ibn-Taymiyah, a strict traditionalist who allowed little scope for reason or independent thinking. He was also a product of his geographical environment, a remote outpost of history.
Unlike Egypt, Syria, Lebanon, Iraq and Yemen, where ancient civilizations had flourished and made their mark on human history, or places like Dubai and Hijaz, which lay on trade routes and dealt extensively with the outside world, the desert of Najd in the Eastern Province of what is now Saudi Arabia had no civilization to speak of before Islam. Nor did it ever become a cultural centre like the capitals of the Caliphate, Medina, Damascus and Baghdad. Thanks to its arid, barren landscape, Najd remained a cultural backwater, its sole contribution to the arts a traditional form of poetry that spoke of narrow tribal matters.
The harsh and unforgiving environment in which the Najdis lived explains why Mohamed ibn-Abdul Wahab found a receptive audience for the equally harsh and unforgiving brand of Islam he preached. The same environment that produced the founder of Wahhabism later produced the radical Ikhwan movement which challenged the authority of King Abdul Aziz ibn-Saud. In the nineteen twenties, the king took on the Ikhwan, who were openly accusing him of deviating from the true faith. When he returned to Riyadh after joining Hijaz to his kingdom, the Ikhwan said he had left on a camel and come back in an American car!
This was just one of many clashes between the movement and the king over such issues as whether the radio was sinful or the telephone an invention of the devil, in short, over any of the fruits of modernity which threatened their fundamentalist vision of the world. It is a vision that can only be understood by studying what is known as the secret sects of Islam (radical fringe movements that never became part of mainstream Islam), as well as the message of Mohamed ibn-Abdul Wahab, the product of many factors, including the sociological and geopolitical environment of the deserts of Najd.
These factors allowed the Wahhabis, after they invaded Hijaz, to impose their austere understanding of religion throughout the Arabian Peninsula. Among other things, they banned headstones and any structures identifying burial sites, insisting on unmarked graves flush with the land. They combated Sufism in Mecca and elsewhere as contrary to the teachings of Islam. They even entered into an armed clash with the Egyptian mahmil, a splendidly decorated litter on which the Egyptians sent a new cover for the Ka'bah every year. The mahmil ceremony was a merry occasion celebrated by the Egyptians with their traditional love of music, dancing and revelry. For the Najdis, who had launched their puritanical revival movement to purge Islam of what they saw as deviations from the straight and true path of orthodoxy, such unseemly displays of levity could not be tolerated.
What I want to cast light on here i
"Flyin' in just a sweet place,
Never been known to fail..."
What you're describing is generally known as "agnosticism".
And generally incorrectly known as agnosticism. Agnosticism is the philosophy that the existence of gods is unknowable.
One can be an agnostic atheist, a gnostic theist, an agnostic theist or a gnostic atheist.
Atheism and agnosticsm are orthogonal.
I think that some people cannot grasp the idea that a belief in God and practice of religion can be as rational as any empiricist.
As an agnostic atheist, I hold that belief in God and practice of religion can not be rational. Belief without evidence is not rational belief. There is no evidence for the existence of gods. Therefore belief in gods is irrational.
Atheism, by definition, is far less rational because of the greater logical difficulty of proving a negative.
Atheism, by definition, is minimally the lack of belief in gods (the "weak atheist" position). The "strong atheist" point of view, which holds that there are no gods, is also not irrational, due to the positivist axiom that no thing can rationally be said to exist without evidence for its existence; it is therefore rational to deny the existence of anything X for which there is no evidence.
Shrug. To each their own.
www.kitchengeek.com -- Nosh for
If you're Malaysian and are aware of the facts of the matter, please take 1 min to sign the petition at http://www.petitiononline.com/jeffooi/petition.htm l