Muhammad Abdul Rauf

I am thinking of adopting this name.

Last Thursday, I got elected involuntarily as the President of MSAJ (Malaysian Student's Association in Japan) in Kansai area branch. Which means that from now on, I shall be the one who is in charge of all the collective Malaysian student events here.

Which I don't want to do, for I hate events.

No choice. Take one for the team.

Anger on Christmas Pt 2

Those people who avoid wishing their Christian friends Merry Christmas, be warned.

The whole logic of not wishing them Merry Christmas as it would be equivocal to recognizing the Trinity of God, and recognizing that Jesus is the begotten Son of God, is not a good logic. It is a logic which doesn't care what others think, a logic which spreads suspicion among people, and a logic that can possibly breed enmity based on religious differences.

If Christians have the same logic, they won't respect our Ramadan. They won't let us celebrate Maulid Nabi, they won't let us have our Azans in loudspeakers, they would say that Muslims are followers of Antichrist!

There's this whole notion among Christians (of course I am talking about the freaking fundamentalists) that we Muslims are heretical, deviant, and violent followers of an excommunicated church, manipulated by a false Messiah called Muhammad. Us not wishing Merry Christmas to Christians might fuel this thought among the Christians, increasing their enmity toward us, and consequentially this will increase our enmity towards them.

There is no communication where there is enmity.

Anger on Christmas Pt 1

There's this stupid thing recently about not wishing Christians "Merry Christmas" because, as it was argued, wishing them Merry Christmas would be equivocal with us recognizing the Trinity of God, as Christmas is a celebration of the Nativity of the Son of God.

Heh.

Poor people with backward religious beliefs, and lack of understanding of the history of religion in a humanistic sense, and also lack of thinking about the implications of not wishing Christians (or anyone who celebrates it, for that matter-not all those who celebrates Christmas are Christians, mind you), I don't know whether I shall pity them, or I shall be angry at them. Maybe I should be both.

We must know that 25 December is not the exact date of the Nativity of Yeheshua (this is Jesus' Hebrew name-I prefer this)-the formerly institutional pagan Romes would never know the exact date, as they were, under the National Imperial Roman Pagan Church, discriminating against Christians in a way that to today's standards, would be termed on par with the Nazi's Holocaust. So when the Roman Empire became Christian somewhere in the 4th century-300 or more full years after Yeheshua's supposed death on the Cross-it is logical, as illiteracy were rampant, that almost no one among them would know the exact date anymore.

So they took the 25 December as the date, as this was the date of Saturnalia, a Roman pagan festival celebrating the deity Saturn. So much for the purpose of celebrating the Christian creed.

Well, history put aside, nowadays people don't really celebrate Christmas to celebrate Jesus anymore. Some Christians do, I won't deny it, and in the religious Malaysia, the Christians are about as religious as Muslims, and they would be appalled by the suggestion that Christmas was a pagan Roman festival-"Ridiculous!" At any rate, wishing "Merry Christmas" is not the same thing as recognizing Trinity. There's a whole line of thinking among the Christians called Unitarism-those people don't believe in Trinity- and yet they still celebrate Christmas. Not to mention the contemporary atheists and agnostics who celebrate it for the fun of it.

Naive thinking among the religious sometimes pisses me off.

Don't be afraid, W4LR6S.

Mei tou Melayu ako ih. Ako mesti senged ih.

Islam is both our strength and our weakness.