Monday, September 13, 2010

So Much For Religious Rights

Indonesian Constitution guarantees religious freedom. Sadly, more and more people arent able to practice their religious rights due to a bylaw that is being abuse by some fanatics. The majority keeps acting as victim while they make it difficult for minority to worship in their churches/temples because the fact is there are not enough temples/churches around. It's not easy to build a place of worship when you are not moslem in Indonesia because moslems are afraid that once such place of worship is built in their area, there would be people converting from Islam to whatever religion of that place of worship, moslems had also been cited that they found the singing/chanting and the bells ringing as disturbance. As someone living almost next to a musholla which starts using their loudspeakers at 2 AM during Ramadan, I found what ever they were saying about noise disturbance is rich.


It makes me mad seeing how tugs such as FPI are free to abuse their majority position on the minority while the government looks the other way. When people are outrage about it, the government just issues a statement about how religious rights is protected by the constitution without really acting protecting that rights. What's good of just protecting the rights of majority while abusing the other? When will our government do the right thing and stand up for those who are abused? We are tired of rethoric, it's time to act before things got worse.

3 comments:

colson said...

A majority being afraid a foreign religion will take over...We see the mirror image here(parts of the US and Western Europe): people like Geert Wilders are getting growing support for opposing the building of mosques and stopping immigration from Arab and other countries with Muslim majorities. A lot of irrational fear for being overwhelmed by a foreign religion en their shariah. Fortunately we are still free from vigilantes FPI style.

triesti said...

it's frustrating seeing this problem and that of NYC mosque. Being majority doesnt automatically mean that you are right, it means there are many of you, that's all.

Unknown said...

Yeh that's why you have a constitution and the rule of law in the first place.

Problem is though, that Indonesia obviously has a very badly functioning rule of law. And then it boils down to one thing - might is right.