Boy, the chief justice of the Indonesian Supreme Court has a weird sense of humor. He told Angela Merkel (who is in Indonesia on a visit) that the Indonesian constitution guarantees the rights of atheists. Orilly? How does he explain Alexander Aan then?
Supreme Court chief Mahfud MD is telling the vesting German chancellor that the Indonesian Constitution gives people the freedom to be atheist or communists.
Mahfud was answering Chancellor Angela Merkel’s question about the freedom of religion and democracy in Indonesia during a visit to the Supreme Court on Tuesday evening.
“Since its inception, the Supreme Court has guaranteed the freedom of atheists and communists in this country, as long as they do not disturb the freedom of people of other religions. Freedom is equality.” Mahfud said.
Something seems to have gone wrong then, because Alexander Aan is in prison, serving a two year sentence for saying God doesn’t exist on Facebook.
Louis CK? I dunno. I think CJ Mahfud is more like the president-wannabe, flip-flopper-in-chief Mittens… It’s the same sort of barefaced lies and gross misrepresentations of publicly-recorded and verifiable facts that Mittens is famous for.
No no, this is just like those religions who say it’s perfectly fine to be gay as long as you don’t have sex with anyone of the same gender. It’s perfectly fine to be an atheist in Indonesia, as long as you never tell anybody. Get it now?
Anyone care to explain how atheists and communists fit in the same box?
@ 3 – because we all hates’em.
It’s a Hobson’s Choice: The rights of atheists are protected as long as they conform, in all outward appearances, to one of the legally acceptable religions.
Exactly. After all, saying that there is no god would be FtBullying* of religious people.
*- Not to be confused with actual bullying.
The reason he specifically mentions communists is that Indonesia has a particularly nasty period in its recent past concerning communists. Namely 1965. Thousands, hundreds of thousands, were killed after show trials in village after village in most of the country (some few areas were relatively free of this, but that was not common) after Suharto took power. Suharto’s reason for taking power was an abortive coup attempt by a group which was communist, a group spurred by false promises of support — supposedly from China but actually done by the British and the US.
Many more were imprisoned and/or in self-imposed exile for years.
Atheists, and the Chinese, were also distrusted as “outsiders” since overall Indonesia tends to be a pretty religious country, so they tend to get grouped together. Many Chinese also got caught up in the 1965 crap; I have no knowledge at all if atheists tended to get stuck in with them as well but wouldn’t be surprised.
Now to Aan’s case: Mahfud’s weasel phrase is “as long as they do not disturb the freedom of people of other religions”.
I cannot see the Indonesian government acting toward any relgious group or person as they have against Aan for actions which “disturb the freedom of” atheists if they did things which were similar to what Aan did, which was simply stating some things, fairly mildly. Even if the things he wrote were not true it’s a big so-what, or is when similar things are said about atheists.
Duh. He hurt the fee-fees of the religious. Obviously a disturbance of freedom.
He also linked to some explicit cartoons which no doubt did upset Muslims in an entirely predictable way. That’s not to say their reaction is proper; just that it’s predictable even without a theocratic government in the mix.
I just did some quick reading on the Indonesian constitution and religion and see how Mahfud is finessing the matter; that is, he’s doing a bit of a misdirection over something which is confusing and vague in the constitution.
In a paper titled “Religious Freedom in Indonesia before and after Constitutional Amendments” by Mohamad Mova Al ‘Afghani, he says:
“There are two ways of evaluating the influence of religion-state relationship towards structural norms, namely from the liberty side and from the equality side. It is true that the 1945 Constitution prefers a theistic worldview compared to non/a theistic worldviews. However, this discrimination can only occur on the equality side and not the liberty side: theistic worldviews could be given more previlege and state facilities or
financial supports compared to non/a theistic worldviews. Conversely, on the liberty side – after Constitutional Amendments – no discrimination shall be made. This means that the right of “deviant” sects and the rights of atheist or non theist shall be remain protected: they should be allowed to profess their beliefs. Constitutional amendments also emphasize the liberty in terms of the freedom of thought and conscience and put them at the same level as religions. Consequently, blasphemy codes will have to weigh the freedom of thought and conscience. Blasphemy codes which are too extensive could be declared unconstitutional.”
Our way of looking at this distinction between what he calls the “equality” and “liberty” labels, I think, would be that being an atheist in Indonesia is not illegal but religion is privileged, and that necessarily creates a conflict between free expression as an atheist and the limits caused by the existing religious privilege. Obviously virtually everyone here would be thinking that what Aan did was not slanderous, perhaps insulting in terms of the cartoons but still not slanderous, and certainly not something that deserves legal punishment in any case (at least that is my view).
There’s also the distinction between the rights of an individual to not be slandered and the rights of a group not to be slandered (even granting slander). We tend toward not granting such rights to groups, and the more nebulous the group the less we feel the right should be given (but then we’ve got food disparagement laws running about, so we don’t have too high a moral ground; individuals sure, some groups, yes, but “us” as a country, not so much — “beef” is even less an entity deserving of protection from insults than a religion). Other places are more likely to feel groups, even nebulous groups like “religion X” deserve much the same, if not more, protection than an individual.
Well maybe someone should have done a better job of vetting him, to see whether or not he, Alexander Aan, would be a worthwhile addition to the state of Indonesian…
“Atheists, and the Chinese, were also distrusted as “outsiders” since overall Indonesia tends to be a pretty religious country, so they tend to get grouped together. Many Chinese also got caught up in the 1965 crap; I have no knowledge at all if atheists tended to get stuck in with them as well but wouldn’t be surprised.”
Marxists- communists- were probably the only atheists even educated Indonesians knew about then, anthrosciguy. Even though most of the Chinese in Indonesia were capitalist traders, the fact that the Indonesian Communist Party had vocally maoist members and their own ties with family and connexions in China itself, combined with anti-Chinese racism, meant that they were identified with communism and atheism. The interesting thing is that Mafud still seems to assume communism and atheism go together.
It simply wasn’t that Chinese were assumed to be linked with communists. That could have been the case in some instances, certainly, but it was not a general thing. It was the outsider thing, which we’ve seen with the Chinese in many places (certainly here in North America).
The communists in Indonesia were not, AFAIK, particularly atheist. Given their numbers I rather doubt they were. (They were certainly strongly for a secular government, which many Indonesians were. Secular, of course, is not atheist.) That is, however, something I don’t have specific knowledge of to any great degree, although due to past associations I’ve heard plenty about the rest of the 1965 story. If you have some specific info that’s counter to this, I’d love to know (although this is getting kinda a little too OT I guess).
It’s a mistake to assume that Indonesian forms of X (Islam, communism, etc.) are very like those of other places. For instance, in the area we’re talking about here, where Aan lives, they are devoutly Islamic and strongly matrilineal — both, plus traditional rules, are at play and not, according to the way they manage them, all that much in tension as you might expect. So much so matrilineal that Peggy Sanday says that they should be described as a matriarchy, at least if we describe the reverse forms accurately as patriarchies (and we do describe them as such, whether truly accurate or not). In fact the Minangkabua are the people I recently (in comments here) referred to as having a virtually rape-free culture — and not via draconian punishment but through societal pressure. Just goes to show that a society that we can feel is quite admirable in some ways and something we should aspire to can simultaneously be just awful.
Just like people. (cough! Dawkins cough!)
God exists on Facebook! And he pisses off religious people. https://www.facebook.com/TheGoodLordAbove
But just because someone hadn’t found his profile, doesn’t mean they should be jailed.
The notion that the Indonesian constitution “guarantees” the rights of atheists is a bit iffy to me. Sounds like someone’s trying to make nice to a godless Westerner.
There are only 6 religions officially recognised in Indonesia and everyone’s identity card must show which one of those 6 the person belongs to. There is no ‘none of the above’ option.
Once you’re allocated to your religion, any statement you might make about the non-existence of god/s must unavoidably be blasphemy. Blasphemy carries a jail term. Simple, really.
The notion that the Indonesian constitution “guarantees” the rights of atheists is a bit iffy to me. Sounds like someone’s trying to make nice to a godless Westerner.
It’s a sneaky semantic argument: his actual statement, as reported, is that the constitution grants that atheists are free to exist in Indonesia. Actual rights are then a separate thing, much like homosexuals are allowed to exist in many fundamentalist churches but only if they don’t do much of anything other than existing.
Actually it’s a logical fallacy Mahfud is engaging in there; the complaint is not that Aan is not being allowed to exist, that they are denying him the right to exist. The complaint is that he is being denied the right to make some statements — some extremely mild, some links to less mild provocations — and so Mahfud coming back talking about providing him with a right to exist is a non sequitor, an answer to a question that is not being asked. And in doing so pretending to have answered the question that was asked, which is basically why should he be punished for doing what he did.
“It simply wasn’t that Chinese were assumed to be linked with communists. That could have been the case in some instances, certainly, but it was not a general thing.”
I’d disagree, there. I lived in Malaysia a few years later and a common assumption among both Malaysian and Indonesian muslims I met was that Chinese people were atheists or did not believe in a “proper” god unless they adopted a “religion of the book”. Even then they were often thought to be still atheists, but opportunist atheists. It was also assumed thatr the first loyalty of the Chinese was to China- the Chinese nation- regardless of its government.
“The communists in Indonesia were not, AFAIK, particularly atheist. Given their numbers I rather doubt they were”
…except that communists are obliged to be atheists by its basis in marxism. However, communists are no more logically consistent than other people, and- as you say- “with the exception of Indonesia” is a good general rule, so that need not always have applied. Communists were certainly perceived as being atheist, though, and presumably by the people who killed them as much as by others. People were confused as to whether they were atheists because they were communists or viceversa, but the two were seen as going together and with each belief- or nonbelief- supporting the other’s wickedness.
This was a few years after 1965 and there was certainly a perceived nexus Chinese-atheist-communist among Malays and Indonesians and an assunption that Chinese people were much more likely to be atheist and communist than others.
But with the Chinese in Malaysia you are talking about people saying they were atheist without regard to the facts — saying it, in the majority of cases, because they were a different religion, which is like fundamentalists saying that progressive Christians and all Catholics are not Christians — they may belive it but it does not make it so. Similarly I just don’t think you can assume that any given communist accepts every single aspect of Marx and Engles, just as you can’t expect that every religious person accepts every aspect of their religion. We know, for instance, that around 95% of Catholics don’t accept Catholicism’s stance on contraception; that’s an awfully big percentage and according to your “the dictionary says” approach this cannot be… but it be. I don’t have hard facts on the numbers of atheists among communists in Indonesia but given what I know of the country I’d think the number is pretty low. Again, if you have actual information on their numbers that would be interesting information.
Dang, I hadn’t been following this for a couple of days. Interesting stuff, thanks.
Isn’t the point here the fact that Chinese people, communists and atheists were and are perceived as closely connected by Malays and Indonesians, Anthrosciguy, and treated as though they were and that Mahfud still seems to associate communists and atheists? That’s a different question to how many communists were atheists and viceversa.
I don’t know, but from a muslim view traditional Chinese philosophy and beliefs probably look more like atheism than a religion. It’s certainly outside the divine revelation in a book that is acceptable as the basis for a religion to muslims.
I don’t know how many Indonesian communists were atheists: membership- past or present- of the Indonesian Communist Party wasn’t a popular topic, especially among people said or thought to be Indonesian Communists. Nor was atheism- even my admitted agnosticism was regarded as very dubious.
In most countries C.P. membership was usually by invitation and the views of prospective members were closely examined. The Indonesian C.P. may have been less selective- that would help account for its size- but the basic texts- Marx, Engels, Lenin, Stalin, Mao- are virulently atheistic. Being a believer and a communist wouldn’t just be a matter of disregarding some aspects of their religion but completely opposing it. Even if CP members said they were muslims, it may have been a matter of tactics rather than belief. I don’t think we can know how many CP members were religious believers or how sincere those who said they were were. What we do know is that there was a perceived connexion between Chineseness, atheism and communism or a tendency to support communism and that that influenced the way people were- and are- treated.