I'm back from scuba diving in Indonesia

I was gone for the last month or so due to going on a dive trip to one of most remote locations on Earth (for diving at least): the Raja Ampat islands of eastern Indonesia. Trips like this give you perspective. We spent 11 days on a dive boat crewed entirely by Indonesians who were Muslim, Christian, and Hindu--and who all got along perfectly. 

In fact, everywhere we went in Indonesia we were welcomed by the locals, regardless of which religion they practice. The only problem we had was with the mosques. In Islamic tradition muzzeins ascend the four towers surrounding a mosque five times a day to sing out the call to prayer. 

Well, no more. Now they use a sound system Iron Maiden would envy. We discovered this during a stay in a hotel in Makassar, a city of over a million souls. The nearest mosque was several blocks away, and the call to prayer was so loud we could hardly hear ourselves talking, even with the hotel window closed. It is as offensive as some ghetto thug plunking himself down on a crowded beach with a giant boombox played full blast, daring anyone to object.  

The same thing is practised in Bali, which is over 90% Hindu. Yet even there the local mosques blare out their sectarian message while nearly everyone in earshot grinds his teeth at the offense. 

This is not like church bells in Christian towns. The bells don't have words. And, most importantly, the bells are not hyper-amplified. The mosque PA even went off at 4:30AM, waking up all of us in our group.

There was a stark contrast between the behavior of Islam at the mosque level vs. that of individual Moslems at the personal level. In that same town my spouse and I were walking along the beach and young Moslem women came running up to be photographed with us. It was a status thing, because white people are so rare in that area. 

I wonder if the mosques are being run by Saudi-trained majoritarian Imams who believe religion should be coercive? Seemed like it. And if so, their ideological soulmates would be American Christianists who believe America should be a Christian theocracy. That sounds extreme, and it is, but they're pursuing their goals incrementally. And to add insult to injury, they justify it by claiming that Christianity is under attack and they're merely defending themselves. 

Of course there are militant atheists who are trying to use the courts to expel every trace of religion from public life. But what % of the American public do they represent? I'd guess .005% of the population. At least 2/3 of Americans say they're Christians. To then go and play the victim card--as if they're a persecuted minority like Christians really are in Iraq--is simply obscene.

 

Loudmouthed mosques there, science-denying schoolboards here. All cut from the same cloth of coercive belief systems, whose partisans are trying to stuff the rest of us like geese being prepared for paté.