That is exactly what freedom of religion is to do with. You may be told you have to accept a certain part of a religious teaching, but only you can make the decision on whether you accept it or not. And like you say, it makes no sense to follow the ‘bad’ teachings, so there is no reason to follow them.
Good question. The problem we have at the moment is that we still seem to be deciding on all of that. Only ‘society’ currently has the most definitive explanation of what those morals may be, and even then it’s a whole other question as to whether they’re good or not.
Oh my gosh! Yes!! Sorry I just love a bit of history, and this is one the most important agreements in modern history. It’s become one of the most prevalent post-colonial matters of our time. If only Britain and France could have accepted that control of land didn’t have to be decided by them…
As some of us have pointed out, there is a lot of reading to do to try and keep up with all this. I’ll do my best to shorten everything from now on to help
That about sums up the dichotomous view of the Christian experience perfectly. Note that attitudes vary across the spectrum of denominations and some denominations are more amenable to change than others. If you want the historical breakdown on a world map (and the size of their congregations), then this is as comprehensive a list as you can easily get. In Australia, in general, the denominations we would encounter can most conveniently be broken down into: Catholic, Anglican, Presbyterian, Uniting, Assembly of God/Pentecostal. There’s also a fair Eastern Orthodox population, and of course other ‘radical’ breakaways (Jehovah’s Witness, Seventh Day Adventist, Mormons, i.e. the ‘door-knocker’ factions ;)). When it comes to stances on LGBT etc., based on my conversations and reading, I think it goes something like this:
Catholic: Refer to Pope Francis’ recent utterances on this, essentially pushing for a paradigm shift. He’s the most progressive pontiff this Church has seen since like ever.
Orthodox: they’re orthodox. I don’t think they’re about to change short of Divine Intervention
Anglican: I honestly don’t know. Having looked up the official word, I now realise this is because they don’t really know either They’ve decided to keep their nose clean but also say well let’s acknowledge social progress but also we don’t condone formally blessing gay relationships.
Presbyterian: They’re a modest bunch and regard themselves as the remainder of what’s now the Uniting Church. They’re also a fairly relaxed bunch so probably have left it as much as they can.
Uniting Church: A few years ago the Australian peak body caused a furore by declaring that they would not forbid gay ministers from practicing and becoming heads of a church and they’d leave this decision up to each church. This actually caused a bit of a schism, which is interesting in itself because at least in Australia the Uniting Church is a big diverse conglomeration loosely tied together by Calvinist doctrine.
Assembly of God/Pentecostal: this is probably the most interesting one. AFAIK, this church originated from a revivalist movement in the US in the early 1900s and is the most spiritualist on the spectrum. It’s been difficult to nail down exactly which congregation believes what and that’s because this is also one of the most diverse, but also most fractured denominations in Australia, and here, the attitude one encounters is actually divided by ethnic lines of all things the main exception being Hillsong, which taps mostly into the ‘affluence doctrine’ of ‘God Blesses Me With Abundant Wealth’ in direct contradiction with Paul’s praise for poverty and self-immolation. I’m told that this part of the AoG culture stemmed from post WWI US, but I don’t know a lot about that. Caucasian congregations are more more likely one of those ridiculously chirpy bunch who make for the mosh pit during worship and jumps up and down hoping for the Rapture (I’m not actually trying to lambast this, that’s a serious and literal description). They also tend to be a bit happier-go-lucky with your beliefs and it’s really hard to figure out what they really think about the tricky social issues like the gays, abortion, divorce etc. I know several Caucasian Pentecostals and the ones that do comment on those issues, they pretty much give it all a free pass and say “Jesus alone matters!” which is quite chill.
Asian and African congregations, on the other hand, tend to be the ethnic counterparts to the white radical Evangelical Right wing nationalist nutters who would probably vote One Nation if they didn’t have their own Australian Christian Lobby or Family First party. Which makes sense on one level (these populations tended to being homophobic and social conservative in the first place), but on all other levels in Australia’s society is completely absurd, considering just how strong the correlation between voting social conservative and voting anti-immigration and also anti-not-White actually is. They’re also by far and away the most vocal lobby group, the most hostile to social-progressive programs as they see it as a direct threat to their identity and continued existence. That’s just a clusterfuck to me.
This is probably in fairly sharp contrast to other nations who have a different breakdown, and even the same denomination in different countries will have different attitudes. For example, here’s some selected data from the Pew Research Center on attitudes to homosexuality by religious affiliation in the US. The sample space is only about 35000 so it may have a fair margin of error. Note that the vast majority of Americans still say they’re Christian but most of them don’t have a denomination (and I’d go further to say most of them don’t even practice), and they seem like a pretty chill bunch.
While I’m looking at that page, I think it’s also worth noting that American Buddhists are relatively social progressive. If you compare this to say Buddhists from Asian/South-East Asian countries, again, you’ll find that Asian countries tend to have conservative social values and they’ll quietly frown and not want to talk about it (talking about the different takes on Buddhism throughout the world is even more difficult so I’m not going to try here). If I had to hazard a guess, I would actually say that you’re more likely to find globally uniform trend to disapproval among Muslims, although as you can see that’s only a weak majority in the US and I suspect similar in Australia. It’s far more strict in Africa and the Middle-East. The most sensible theory for this is that they haven’t had quite the same kind of internal unrest and stirring and cultural revolutions that the Christian church has gone through over the last several centuries, though, with the current international climate, who knows, maybe the time is coming. I mean, either we can go on killing each other or the moderates can get to the microphone and some kind of new civility can be reestablished.
i think the reasons are, asian nations are slightly behind on tech and held more tightly their local culture and social values at the time where religion was spreading worldwide. so when these apostles were trying to spread the religion to said place, they make the religion more ‘flexible’ and ‘adapt’ to the local culture, or even try to integrate them, to make it easier to accept this ‘newly found belief’ for us asians.
and i believe that carries on until today. the way we integrate our religion into our everyday lives and culture is different than westerners do. but one thing also stayed, our unwillingness to change/adapt/accept the new thing again, we’re very reluctant to do so. but once they just can’t deny that it is happening whether they like it or not, that’s when they just start to avoid the topic completely, because they don’t like it, and don’t want to accept it.
but fortunately, or maybe unfortunately, most of these people are from the last generations, and the newer generations are much more open. so the only thing we can do is just to wait for the generation takeover when these ‘new generations’ become the majority.
Solid explanation on Asian hivemind haha. I think the most astute observations that we (younger generation) can relate to come from those who have been distanced from the lands of their ancestry yet are still immersed in the cultural remnants that their family cling to. The philosophy is fundamentally different, leading to a sense of displacement (speaking from personal experience). What we’re seeing now are the Asian immigrant story which ranges from YouTube comedians to actual TV shows and New York Times columnists, expressing usually their bemusement, and often resentment at how sharply the ‘tradition, respect, family’ values of their origins contrasts with the ‘innovate, challenge, individual’ values of their new setting.
Speaking of traditional worldviews, another thing I’d like to bring up, is just how closely correlated racism, parochialism, chauvinism and sexism are. We’re currently making much ado about the supposed “white male majority” of Trump voters (one side calls them “real America”, the other side calls them a bunch of undesirables, both sides miss the point). White people get a bad rap about this, but seriously, if you want the full hand, look at native Asians holy shit. Whether you’re Chinese, Japanese, Vietnamese, Korean, Laotian, Cambodian etc. etc (not going to talk about Indonesia, I think koolkei can fill me in)., take an actual good look at their culture and you’ll likely find these things in common in greater prevalence than in a Western society:
The man is the head of the family and makes the money decisions
The woman belongs in the kitchen. And frequently does the household management
The man is expected to be stoic
The woman is expected to be quiet and homely
Being gay is bad and we don’t talk about it
There’s also generally only one way to talk about sex. The guy does it to the girl. And… we don’t have any words for any variation on this theme.
Do not trust your ethnic neighbours. Chinese hate on other Chinese a lot. Japanese hate all other Asians, particularly the Chinese (they don’t have good relations, see most of Chinese martial art cinema for a reference) etc. etc. Speaking as somebody who grew up in a globalised, multicultural environment, this really grinds my gears. Seriously we’re all yellow-skinned in this world ffs what’s the big deal?
Now these are really broad generalisations but I think they’re a decent starting point. The next question is what are the exceptions and why would it vary? China itself is interesting because it’s in a state of flux. After thousands of years of prominent civilisation and scholarship, it had first its lands and people ravaged (by Japanese occupation), and then it suffered spectacular self-immolation in the form of the Cultural Revolution (I’ve just put myself on the CCP’s hit list saying that). Now that the urban centers are nearing the tail end of industrialisation and many of its citizens are encountering the temptations of extreme affluence, the cultural landscape of China is also rapidly changing, and this is hardly a coincidence (also shaped largely by the CCP’s highly stringent social policies e.g. one child policy). Now, women are expected not to be housewives, but often are dynamic and have university degrees and a high paying job. This really throws men off their game because having the woman earn more than you??? mind blown! And so on and so forth if you have time you should watch a few episodes of the TV dating show: If You Are the One… my girlfriend informs me that the actual nuance of the translation reads more like a thinly veiled ultimatum than a question
It looks like I’m making an argument there that industrialisation and modernisation strongly correlate. Maybe this is true, but then Japan really stands out as quite the distortion… and Japanese expat youth will tell you exactly as much: not constrained by the confines of keeping up appearances, they often speak freely and critically about the stifling rigidity of their culture despite their country having remade themselves as the world leading technocracy out of sheer post-war necessity. And to bring it full circle, their porn. Well. We all know about their porn, goodness gracious.
no it also still applies to Indonesia too. so all the point except for the last point is still quite prevalent
(chinese don’t hate other chinese because of their races in particular, but rather because they apply their race’s norm everywhere, and most of the time other chinese people don’t like that. so it’s rather a clash of norm rather than about race or nationality)
dunno about japanese and china thing nowadays though.
but here, well at least in Indonesia, there’s a split going on. the more educated, more well-off people, basically anyone that is NOT poor, are being exposed to westernization (or maybe ‘californication’? ). nowadays a majority of these richer people can accept and willing to ‘let go’ some of their norms and culture and those points are not apparent anymore, or just barely apparent.
now for japanese, i sometimes watch some number of japs youtuber, and some number of japs documentary and what sticks out is. either they integrate their norm to their proffesional live incredibly well, or they just separate their professional and their norm restricted personal life really well. we see that they can really open up their minds (a bit too much sometimes, you know that when you find a JAV, where a living doll replacing the male character). but the senpai/kouhai thing that we often play around with is actually still considered a serious mannerism even today. calling your ‘senpai’ without the correct ummm whatdoyoucallthat ‘xxx-san’ thing is considered rude. and then i watched a survey about japanese girls and their dream males, it’s still points back to those points that you said.
basically they want their men to be almost all around better than them, even when the girl themselves are climbing their own career without looking back. (one of the reasons marriage numbers are also going down over there.)
of course, even the most open minded person here still needs to pick and choose which culture from the west they can apply where they live. otherwise they’ll be distanced from and considered an outcast.
and strop. don’t listen to him. isn’t continuing this conversation interesting
This is the last point I’m going to hone in on for tonight, because the US election results seem to stand in stark defiance of the general idea that post-industrialisation → affluence → growth of culture → social progressiveness (or liberalism, hedonism, what have you). Consider the following:
Donald Trump easily won the college electoral vote thanks mainly to all the middle states swinging Red.
Hilary Clinton won the popular vote by a significant margin, and I can’t remember the stats but I’m going to say that was mostly California.
Pro-Trumpian pundits frequently argue that the swing in the vote is a resurgence in representation for the underrepresented impoverished working class, hence the swing represents anti-establishment.
But your average Republican voter is richer than your average Democratic voter.
Anti-Trumpian pundits frequently argue that the swing in the vote is a resurgence of social regressive values, namely racism and sexism, hence the swing represents The White Supremacist Patriarchy or somesuch. Their evidence for such is that even pre-exit polling, there was a clear trend in non-college educated white males being Trump’s main base for support.
So the question is… without referring to the spike in hate crimes against minorities following the election, because that just showed that douchebags became enabled douchebags, how true is this really? This is the crucial question in determining what the cultural makeup of America will become, and all eyes of the world are on this.
Some of my stats and philosophy trained academic and philanthropist friends are going over the results to try to figure out the significance of the change in voting attitudes to see if they can figure out how true each argument is, because as it stands, neither argument entirely adds up, and the Social Prog. movement really needs to make sense of it if they know what it is they wish to address constructively. It challenges some of our central premises about what education is and the opportunities they afford, since we thought we established the following through countless population studies both in Western countries and elsewhere:
Higher education rates means less poverty and less crime
Higher education rates correlates with more social progressive values (like gender equality)
Clearly blindly assuming these correlations ought to turn into voting patterns blinded much of the social progressive faction given just how shocked they were at how somebody (who isn’t necessarily anything he says he is) managed to be elected based on a social regressive platform, hence my coining it a Tale of Two Americas. So the question is… Who Really Voted For Trump?
What I really want to do here is to invite anybody here who did vote for Trump to declare so and offer some insights into why, although that’s not going to give me a huge sample space. I realise that this doesn’t sound like a super-attractive prospect after all that I just said explicitly declaring that I have a social progressive agenda, for similar reasons to perhaps why the exit polls were so spectacularly incorrect (if people will blanket call you an idiot for voting Trump, well, you’ve got your reasons so just don’t tell them!) But I’d actually really appreciate it if people could offer some more personal, local insights (while I wait for Kyle’s grand analysis) to complement the general principles that I’ve managed to work out so far. I can promise that I won’t criticise or judge anybody, this is a fact finding mission to make sense of things, not a time for more argument, so I’d hope everybody was similarly civil.
Yes, your earlier description of Pentecostal Christians seems pretty close. I am a Pentecostal Christian, and may give a bit more insight into the exacts of what I believe regarding the issues.
I voted for Trump and the Republican party as a whole due to their more Christian views.
One of the primary reasons is for the supreme court justices. Trump has stated he wants to find a SC as close as he can to Scalia’s character and ideals to fill in the current gap. This appealed much more to me than Clinton’s most likely nomination being a very politically left, politically liberal person. (That’s her track record.)
Overall this looks looks like a great thread with serious discussion, and is respectful of others’ beliefs and views.
I dont live in America; I understand that the political climate in the UK and US are vastly different, however, personally I would have voted Hillary. I dont like her, but I believe that she would be a better president that Trump.
tbh I was put off by Trump’s distinctly xenophobic and racist rhetoric, however, to me, the real reason as to why I don’t like Trump is the fact that he has absolutely no experience, as either a politician or a strategist. I really dont understand why Hillary got so much flak from Bengahzi. I understand that she was withholding information to the people in Benghazi, however EIGHT HEARINGS is overkill and a waste of time and money. Considering that only 4 people died, when more could have easily done so, to me it shows that Hillary can at least get out of a situation she messes up herself. If Trump were in the same position, I doubt he would have been able to handle it as well as Hillary did.
(sorry for bringing religion into this) @findRED19 I my self am a Christian (Roman Catholic to be precise) and in my opinion, Trump’s rhetoric is further away from Catholic beliefs than Clinton’s. Yes, Clinton supports certain left wing ideas, however, the foundation of Trump’s arguments on the lead up to the elections were far worse. As we already know, Trump’s rhetoric is specifically written to appeal to xenophobes, examples of course include:(I know I’m para-phrasing) “They’re bringing crime, drugs; they’re rapists…some are good people”, “we need to ban Muslims from entering the country”, etc etc.
Dunno about you, but we, as Christians, are all supposed to treat others like we want to be treated. It’s a basic human right.
it’s interesting, the topic changed starting from pedophiles -> social standards -> morals -> religion -> politics
how did we got here again?
also i hate talking about politics. so i’m not even gonna comment on anything about it
@Dorifto_Dorito sorry? we’re already talking about religion anyway, if we’re already this deep and then only now that someone got butthurt, (see what i did there?) it’s not us, it’s them. most if not all of us are open minded here anyway
anyway. people just won’t stop bringing religions into politics won’t they?
both trump’s and Clinton’s religion basis are questionable. but this seems to also occur in any nation that is related quite closely to religion, doesn’t it.
(here the ‘extremist muslim’ is making a major protest because our capital’s governor is a christian, and he’s the first one to be so. they already made 2 major protest that literally threw quarter of the city into a traffic jam, and now they’re asking for a third one, although the permission for the 3rd one was rejected.)
You know the extreme irony? Norway was one of the first countries in the world to have a constitution that discouraged religious divides by saying that anyone who practices any religion is not allowed to enter the country - they have to become atheist.
Funny thing now, the government is pretty much catholic church backed and despite the fact that literally all Norwegians are protestants or atheist the country is pretty much Christian.
Tl;dr it’s impossible to separate religion and politics. Sad.
Well, religion and politics have been interlinked for thousands of years.(History Lesson Inbound!)
Need to add history now.
For example, in after the Norman Conquest in England, William the Conqueror brought over the Feudal System from…well Normandy. If you look at the feudal system, you will see that at the top, there is the King, who owns all the land. After him its the noblemen and the clergy, followed by knights and finally peasants, with the freemen(peasants with land) having more power than the villeins(peasants with no land). The Feudal system would exist in Europe up until the 1700s! And even then, in certain countries: Israel, Iran, Iraq, Saudi Arabia, etc, religion still plays a key role in policy making.
Oh, and thats just mainly Europe. I havent even gotten to asia…
If I understand correctly, the duty to nominate a new justice to the SC fell to Obama, and so he nominated Merrick Garland (who appears from my brief reading to be centrist or possibly moderate liberal), which conservatives dislike because that means he’s fairly left of Scalia. He’s also far less likely to dissent than Scalia, so would definitely not be as strident a voice. Whereas social progressives are grumbling about the fact the Senate has refused to vote on the nominee until the new President (I probably would have been salty myself but I don’t live in the US haha so dodged a bullet there with regards to this discussion not that having a left vs right argument is actually on my agenda right now anyway).
So I guess my main question (and concern) is this:
Trump has stated he wants to find a SC as close as he can to Scalia’s character and ideals to fill in the current gap
Trump may have stated this, but Trump has also stated a great deal many things the truth of which we simply don’t know about As Kyle (correctly) pointed out, before he capitalised on the populist uprising, he was actually mostly aligned as a liberal Democrat (and good friends with the Clintons, which is quite telling in itself re: the Democrats, in retrospect). I guess if you’re playing percentages, you’d rather the unknown quantity over the known snowball’s-chance-in-hell quantity huh?
Now as for the religious part, this is also interesting and disturbing:
Some loose facts, but facts nonetheless:
This was a while ago so people probably forgot, but Pope Francis actually took the trouble to cast aspersions on Trump’s character, intimating that he was ‘unChristianly’. Considering the rhetoric that he did adopt during his campaign, and his track record with women and beauty pageants, as well as his entire business ethic, this is, well, a pretty easy charge to make stick
The GOP’s response to Trump’s primary candidacy was a bit of a riot (so too the Dems, of course), but ultimately they had to bring in Pence, the Evangelical Establishment candidate, and they had a whole body of Evangelical ministers backing Trump and trying to keep his campaign on track (not that they could do shit, Trump was a Twitter Twister unto himself hahaha). Given the first point this almost seems absurd out of context, but context is key:
I tend to assert that we’ve entered an era of identity politics where sense of self is informed by labels over substance. It is what it is: a natural extension of our social selves, but also a far cry from the ideals of the founding fathers of our society. My criticism of Christian conservative voters in general, and this is a common criticism, is that the things they are willing to condone or be complicit with in the interests of preserving their identity as a Christian, seems frequently at odds with the values of being a Christian. That’s obviously a confronting criticism, as well as controversial and highly dependent on interpretation, but when you have Church constantly trying to influence State (and return to the days where Church WAS State, more on this later), well, it’s obviously going to be ugly (see @koolkei’s comment).
What gets me the most about all of this is that I’m also under the impression that the claim that America is supposed to be a Christian country is in contravention with the intention of the founding documents of the US, which explicitly outlined the foundations of a secular, egalitarian country with a robust defense of personal freedoms, AFAIK. How’s that for a confronting assertion?
Where am I going with all that anyway? I’m interested in the state of the Christian Church today, because the moral battle lines that it seems to be fighting seem to be tied rather closely to its decline which it is now increasingly desperate to reverse. My purpose in the summary of the denominations above was to show that the Church displays a spectrum of responses to these issues. I’m subject to reporting bias here due to my closer contact with certain elements of the Church over others, but I just get this distinct impression that Australia is similar to the US in this respect, and at least in Australia, the social conservative Church is certainly not the sole component, but it has taken a decidedly antagonistic approach to immigration on the belief that immigration means Muslims and Muslims means terrorism and war and particularly the extinction of Christians. I’m of the personal view that the way this is shaping the attitudes of the people within the Church, this is more likely to be a self-fulfilling prophecy.
Let’s consider this bit:
I happen to hear about this a lot, once again, thanks to my evangelical contacts. I obviously get a very biased account on reports, which make much of the incitement to violence and disruption. Open disclosure: Frankly I think bad behaviour should be represented as is regardless of which faction’s perpetrating it, and this does mean defying certain extremes of ‘political correctness gone mad’ where you’re not allowed to criticise certain things because they belong to a certain faction otherwise you are ‘_____phobic’. The extremist Muslim faction in Indonesia is behaving very similarly to people at a Trump rally, i.e. like a big angry mob of bullies. It doesn’t really matter that they belong to different factions. But in this case since the reporting I get is biased, I need to ask somebody who’s perhaps more impartial: @koolkei do you have a reading on what the general mood over there is like with regards to the protest against the Christian Governor Jakarta?
As for the other Christians here in this thread, I’d like to ask you: where do you think the Church is heading, and where ought it go? Is it under threat of extinction? Who are its enemies? Atheists? Other religions? What are the real core principles that must be preserved?
okay. in one word. chaotic.
the full explaination? it’s a bit long
okay let me start on the background first.
The major force, and main provocator of this anti governor is FPI (Front Pembela Islam, or Islamic Defenders Front. dunno what else to defend when they’re the majority, but okay.) FPI has always been known for being a SUPER active and super extremist group with a lot of super vocal and violent members, and some of them have a bit of an influence in the politic world. they’ve been prosecuted multiple times, but still stand. there’s has always a demand for that front to be dissolved even by other ‘normal’ extremist muslims. every time they were to go on a trial, they always revert back to “freedom to believe in their religion and to defend them”, and to say no to that just means violating the law of religion itself here.
(another detour. our first law of our basis of law and everything else the “Pancasila” [means the 5 laws] is “Ketuhanan yang Maha Esa” / “Belief in the one supreme God”. but when it was first devised, this was the original line before it was changed “Ketuhanan dengan kewajiban menjalankan syari’at Islam bagi pemeluk-pemeluknya” with my own as-literal-as-possible translation being “Godliness with the Duty to carry the Islam’s Syariat for the believers”, because 90% of the population of the nation was muslims. let that sink for a moment)
then our current governor. Basuki T. Purnama, but peple just call him “Ahok”, his chinese nickname, because he is also from a chinese lineage. now he is known for a few things.
1 he do what he says. he doesn’t give promises, he gives ‘threats’ to those who won’t go in line (he went super strict with monitoring and punishment to official governments). he only says what he’s doing after he already have plans for it, or the plans are already in motions. that makes him quite different from the usual politicians
2 he’s both an avid christian and are from a chinese lineage. a “hated” combination for those who are still close minded imo.
3 his words are harsh and to the point, sometimes TOO harsh, and seems like he said that without thinking. more on this later. he once literally give a super harsh critic to a certain TV news network, while it was being broadcasted live. it’s was both cringy and an “OOOOOOOOGGGGHHHHH, BUUURRRRNNNN” moment at the same time (poor reporter, she was overwhelmed and didn’t know what to do )
now FPI is constantly looking for the smallest mistakes he make to take him down. he was accused for corruption and fooling the people despite his image, which then proceeded to get his whole financial position checked and audited. not a single fault was found. this instead just solidifies his ground on people’s minds.
but recently he finally said something, i forgot what it exactly was, that basically criticize the Quran and muslims here. it was like 2 sentences long over half an hour of speech (seems like a moment of when he says something without much thought behind it again). but they used that against him anyway. they used that as a fuel to also heat up other islamic based groups, and now a lot of them are on board with it.
right now he is being prosecuted and is now a suspect (was declared like 2-4 days ago) and going to be trialed pretty soon for religion defamation / staining the name of a certain religion.
although he is a suspect, many still believe that he still may not go to trial, but a lot of people and groups are already making threats to do an even bigger riot then last time if he does not go into trial (at this point, even if he does, but the punishment isn’t heavy enough, according to them, they won’t be satisfied anyway. so it’s an incoming chaos one way or another).
but in the end this is a VERY loud and vocal minority. and the majority of people is still very much behind him.
when he was first went up as the vice governor (the governor then, suddenly changed turn and become our current president), he was backed by a party, but midway, a problem arose and he somewhat declared that his party was fucking him from behind instead of backing him. so he quit the party. but people already liked him, and want him to go on the 2nd term. but as he’s not backed by a party, the law said in order for him to go the independent route. he needs 1 million signatures and photocopies of ID cards of the people. sounds unreasonable and insurmountable? nah. he doesn’t even have to do anything in the end. the people instantly formed a group to support him and to collect signatures and the IDs of the people that supports him. he just passed the 1 million mark a few months ago and it’s still climbing right now.
so, silent majority > vocal minority
in fact, even with these cases going on, our largest internet forum in Indonesia held a survey on who are they gonna vote for, for the next governor. and you know what?
it’s a fucking landslide victory like no one has ever seen before.
Well, goes to show, any party with “Defence” or “Front” in it is totally fascist
I wonder just how dangerous the group actually is. Are they going to go around harrassing/assaulting Christians and taking them hostage if they don’t get what they want? Or do they value social leverage?
It really is so similar to what’s going on elsewhere, except flipped. The way I see it, it’s all about angry men waving pitchforks and torches. Where the parallel breaks down, and this would probably have me assailed by death threats if I said this in certain places, is that there’s significant protections in place to protect freedom of but also regulate expression equally in Western countries, but in Islamic Theocracies or strongly Islamist countries, you’d be hard pressed to find a regime that hasn’t or isn’t about to institute an anti-defamation law in favour of Muslim texts.
Back to the history lesson Dorifto Dorito referenced now:
It’s obviously not like the Christian feudal Theocracy that prevailed throughout Europe from William the Conqueror until the Age of Reason didn’t do exactly the same thing. Consider the Crusades, and the Inquisition. Brutal, extremely prejudiced and corrupt Church States enforced complete obedience, stifled progress, and maintained the highest form of wealth inequality possible. I reiterate this was what was explicitly opposed by the founding fathers of America (though obviously it took time for them to have their fight over abolishing slavery…).
This comes back to my suggestion that the Islamic Church States (Mosque-State? ) that we’re seeing are at a different stage of evolution. This evolution isn’t a one-way Street either. Consider that Afghanistan used to be a moderate liberal country with a high female tertiary education rate, as an example of one measure, until the Taliban took over. Same with Libya. And more recently, Turkey. But also consider that both their institution and their collapse can be traced back to the interventions of the West… Where does that leave us in terms of how we should shape foreign policy?
I was resisting reviving this thread because it can be a bit too heavy for most, but I do have a burning question. It is political in nature, though (maybe koolkei can rename the thread, lol)
We’re still a ways off from swearing Trump in as President, but have obviously had a chance to observe the cabinet he is assembling. Particularly for those who voted Trump for various reasons, but also for everybody else, what do you make of the administration that he presents, compared to what you thought or hoped he might do?
I know we have a pretty small sample space here, but it’s not that easy to find an environment where discussion on these things is civil, because the alternative is pretty much stepping into a left or right-wing echo chamber and they’ve got their own things going on. For my part all I get for commenting elsewhere is this one guy I used to know in high school who keeps blasting me with Trumpian platitudes but is incapable of substantiating anything that he has said… and I’m certain people here can do better than that, with no fear of recrimination or censure unless you violate forum TOS of course.
They’ve decided to keep their nose clean but also say well let’s acknowledge social progress but also we don’t condone formally blessing gay relationships.
holy shit. Whether you’re Chinese, Japanese, Vietnamese, Korean, Laotian, Cambodian etc. etc (not going to talk about Indonesia, I think koolkei can fill me in)., take an actual good look at their culture and you’ll likely find these things 
YOU BETTER SHUT THOSE MOTHERFUCKING EYELIDS
). nowadays a majority of these richer people can accept and willing to ‘let go’ some of their norms and culture and those points are not apparent anymore, or just barely apparent.
)