Friday, December 08, 2006

One Big Reason I Am Glad to Live in the United States

I was doing some Internet surfing before getting ready to leave work for home, and came across this article on the BBC's web site about the Sharia police in Aceh on the island of Sumatra in Indonesia.

My favorite was the quote from the leader of the Sharia patrol about the married couple they confronted, "We reminded them that you're not allowed to do this... even though they were actually husband and wife. This is a public place and it stirs up socially jealousy - people don't know they're husband and wife, so they're not allowed to do it."

As much as atheists, including myself, decry the influence of the Religious Right here in America, I am thankful that I live in a country where I have the right to kiss my beautiful wife in public. If I lived in Indonesia though, I couldn't think of a better way to conduct an act of disobedience than to have a mass public smooch session. Just imagine thousands of couples gathering in a public square and locking lips for a good five minutes.

While I don't want to wish natural disasters on anybody, why couldn't that tsunami have washed away these Sharia police busybodies? How about this you fundamentalist assholes, the next time you see a couple holding hands and making out, assume they are married and go find something more valuable to do with your time.

6 comments:

Stardust said...

"For some time we lost everything," he says, "Aceh had no law, there was complete lawlessness. If you were tortured or jailed, who would you report to? Nobody. So when there is no law, people feel any law must be good."

This is a prime example of how religion is used by those in political and religious power to control people throughout the centuries. It is mind-boggling that it continues in these modern times.

Tommykey said...

I think that in some cases increased religious fundamentalism is a reaction to modernism.

We live in a global world that is saturated with images unthinkable just a few generations ago. Some people look at it all and see a world gone astray and that the only way to make things right is to go back to that old time religion.

Tommykey said...

Damn, I just noticed a grammatical error (asshole appears twice in the same sentence) resulting from my rushing to get this post up before leaving work to catch my train.

For some reason, maybe it is because I am currently using a Netscape browser, when I prepare posts on my home computer, I have to type it in the HTML tab, because it won't allow me to write anything in the compose tab. At work, I can use the compose tab and that is how I was able to provide a link to the BBC article.

I tried a couple of times now to edit my post here at home and it freezes up on me. I guess I will have to wait until I go back to work next week to fix it. I wonder if I should switch back to the Internet Explorer web brower that I had before.

Before I got cable connection, I used a dial-up service that used Internet Explorer, and I used Explorer when I first got my cable internet service. Then one day I deleted the files for the dial-up service and after that I could not use Explorer to get onto the internet with my cable connection. The cable software offered the Netscape as its default browser so I went with that. My cable connection worked again after that, but when I started this blog, I noticed that I had a problem with not being able to do posts in the Compose tab and not being able to do things like bold, italicize or attach links in the HTML tab. It's a bummer, because I do most of my posting from home, and am limited in what I can do.

Stardust said...

I use Mozilla Firefox and it works great. Netscape didn't work very well at all for us and we get too many cookies and stuff via Internet Explorer.

Anonymous said...

I also <3 Firefox. SeaMonkey is pretty solid as well; it's a whole suite of internet applications from the same Mozilla code base as Firefox. The browser component is weaker than Firefox, IMO, but the IRC client it has, Chatzilla, is a really nice.

But regarding the post itself! You might also want to consider that PDA is unacceptable in most of Asia. This is dumb in and of itself, but not an atheist concern as such.

Anonymous said...

Internet Explorer SUCKS

Possibly the shittiest browser I've ever used.