Posted in Society on February 13th, 2013 No Comments »
As far as I understand it from my experience living in the United States during my undergraduate years, the Christian right, which is a loose socially conservative religious group, believes that there is a social war going on. It is a war on Christmas. The war is really about the secularization of Christmas. It is a [...]
Posted in Economics, Politics & government, Society on January 11th, 2012 No Comments »
Words for Malaysian religious conservatives, maybe especially for Hasan Ali and his sympathizers. In November, Hazem Salah Abu Ismail, an independent Salafist cleric and presidential candidate, was asked by an interviewer how, as president, he would react to a woman wearing a bikini on the beach? “She would be arrested,” he said. The Al Nour [...]
Posted in Society on December 18th, 2011 1 Comment »
Whereas they feel entirely authentic when they’re couched as “aux armes, citoyens” rallying cries in the struggle against tyranny. Hitchens is never more himself (for better or worse) than when he’s railing against the supposed cruelties of Benedict XVI, or comparing God to Kim Jong-Il. In this sense, he’s really less of an atheist than [...]
Posted in Liberty, Politics & government, Society on May 21st, 2011 No Comments »
Utusan Malaysia recently alleged that Malaysian Christian heads were conspiring to make Christianity the official religion of Malaysia. The conservative Malay daily cited two blogs of questionable credibility to back its front-page report. For a society highly conscious of ethnicity and religion issues, the report caused uproar and tension between various communities. Assuming the allegation [...]
Posted in Education, Society on February 17th, 2011 3 Comments »
Prejudice against any group depends on generalization for it to take root successfully in one’s mind. Although I have to admit that sometimes there are voices in my head whispering ethnic prejudice and stereotype, I typically find it hard to harbor such sentiment for long. I have friends of ethnicities different from mine. If I [...]
Posted in Politics & government, Society on December 15th, 2010 No Comments »
As long as there are those who believe in supernatural explanations to rationalize the completely natural world and as long as there are public choices that require collective decisions, religion will be relevant in our society. The relevance of religion, however, is not a ticket to be used with impunity in the public arena. In [...]
Posted in Liberty, Politics & government, Society on November 19th, 2010 1 Comment »
At a recent public lecture in Sydney, Australia, Anwar Ibrahim said he avoids answering which he aspires to: a secular state or an Islamic state. He reasoned that the issue is contentious and unproductive to engage in. He believes what exists instead is a quasi-secular state, and a hypocritical one at that. He went on [...]
Posted in Books & printed materials, Economics, Society on September 3rd, 2010 No Comments »
Veblen introduced some interesting ideas in The Theory of the Leisure Class. My professor seems to insist that Veblen was an early pioneer in the field of signalling. Although Veblen drove his ideas to the extreme to bring in absurd implications that I simply will not buy, there are specific arguments that I find attractive [...]
Posted in Liberty, Politics & government, Society on January 14th, 2010 10 Comments »
I have clarified my position regarding the usage of the term Allah by Catholic group and by extension, any term by anybody. This reasoning forms the basis of my position not to oppose Catholic group’s use of the term. Indeed, I consider this line of reasoning as not only the most convincing for me, consistent [...]
Posted in Conflict & disaster, Liberty, Society on January 8th, 2010 2 Comments »
And so it has come to this. Amid the tension between those who support — or at least do not oppose — and those who oppose the use of the term Allah by the Catholic Church in Malaysia, a church was torched by arsonists, as the initial reports go.[1] I fear that this might not [...]
The name is Hafiz Noor Shams.
For more about me, please go here.