Chain-smoking at a trendy coffee shop while studiously ignoring the mosque’s evening call to prayer, Indonesian atheists Didi and Dewi have little patience for the beliefs of most of their countrymen.
The two young women are defiant unbelievers in the world’s largest Muslim-majority country, but they let few people in the real world know it.
Instead, the women have joined scores of young Indonesian atheists who have found refuge on the Internet, using web tools such as social networking sites, mailing lists, blogs and wikis to communicate with like-minded people in a country where declaring there is no God can turn someone into an outcast.
“For me personally [going online] is just to share my thoughts and to meet people who think the same way I do, because I don’t see many in my real life,” said Didi, a 29-year-old architect. “It’s easier to say that you’re gay than an atheist.”
Dewi, a 21-year-old student fond of sardonic put-downs of religion and superstition, agreed. In her life in the West Java city of Bandung, she keeps her lack of belief secret from all but her closest friends.
“If someone asks me ‘do you want to pray?,’ then I pray. It’s a political prayer,” she said.
Both women, who refused to give their real names, go online daily to debate religion with fellow atheists — and the few believers hardy enough to brave their barbs — from safely behind their computer screens.
Asked what she would be without the Internet, Didi laughed: “I would be a full-closet atheist.”
It is impossible to know how many atheists there are in Indonesia, a country of 234 million people that is nearly 90 percent Muslim, and where non-believers officially don’t exist.
Every Indonesian must carry an identity card stating his or her adherence to one of six official religions — Protestantism, Catholicism, Islam, Buddhism, Hinduism or Confucianism — and belief in “one God” is the first tenet of the official national ideology of Pancasila.
The deaths of upwards of half a million people during the suppression of the Indonesian Communist Party in the lead-up to the 1966 rise to power of former dictator Suharto have also left their mark. Propaganda during Suharto’s 32-year rule mean atheists are often conflated with communists, a stinging charge in Indonesia
It was such a stigma that prompted a 35-year-old teacher from West Sumatra, known online as “XYZMan,” to start an e-mail mailing list in 2004 to allow atheists to discuss their beliefs. The list now has more than 350 members.
Despite the success of the mailing list, XYZMan said he is forced to keep his own atheism secret in the real world, and has already suffered the breakdown of a marriage with a Muslim woman due to his non-belief.
“If everyone knew that I’m an atheist, I could lose my job, my family would hate me and also some friends,” he said in an e-mail interview, adding “It’s also more likely that I could be physically attacked or killed because I’m a kafir [unbeliever] and my blood is halal [allowed to be spilled] according to Islam.”
Although small in number, Indonesia’s online atheists have been quick adopters of the so-called “Web 2.0” innovations of blogs, wikis and social networking sites.
“We use every means possible [Facebook, etc] to show our existence, gather people,” Karl Karnadi, a 25-year-old Indonesian student studying in Germany who is behind many of the Web projects, said in a Facebook message.
The Web presence also serves to break the language barrier that leaves Indonesians unaware of prominent English-language atheist authors such as Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens, Karnadi said.
The Ateis Indonesia (Indonesian Atheist) wiki carries Indonesian-language articles on topics varying from evolution to arguments for and against religion and “deconversion” testimonials by fellow Indonesians.
“The wiki is some sort of collective knowledge, something that we [hopefully] can use each time we are discussing religion, debating creationists,” Karnadi said.
The Web presence also acts as a kind of support service. The Facebook group also has discussions on how to broach the subject of religion with friends and family, with most members confessing they think it wisest to keep “wearing a mask.”
Crowds in Bangladesh are flocking to snap photographs with an unlikely social media star — an albino buffalo with flowing blond hair nicknamed “Donald Trump” that is due to be sacrificed within days. Owner Zia Uddin Mridha, 38, said his brother named the 700kg bull over its flowing helmet of hair resembling the signature look of the US president. “My younger brother picked this name because of the buffalo’s extraordinary hair,” he said at his farm in Narayanganj, just outside the capital, Dhaka. Mridha said that a constant stream of curious visitors — social media fans, onlookers and children — have come throughout
It began as a satirical online project. Now millions of young people in India are flocking to it as an outlet for their frustration. A parody political party called the Cockroach Janta Party, with the insect as its symbol, has exploded across India’s social media by turning absurdist humor into protest. Memes and short videos mocking corruption, joblessness and political dysfunction have flooded social media sites, where millions of users are embracing the cockroach — known for its ability to survive harsh conditions — as a tongue-in-cheek symbol of endurance. The online movement’s rise has been unusually rapid. The Cockroach Janta Party (CJP)
HOTTER: While Indians are accustomed to summer heat, climate change has caused northwestern India to warm faster than other parts of the country, an academic said Roads and markets have emptied during afternoons and some farmers have switched to nighttime work to avoid scorching temperatures as a heat wave grips large parts of India. The India Meteorological Department forecast maximum temperatures for yesterday of about 45°C in the capital, New Delhi, where authorities have opened temporary “cooling zones” to help people cope. The weather department warned that conditions would likely persist across several northern regions in the coming days, with temperatures staying well above seasonal averages. Authorities urged people to stay indoors during the hottest hours and take precautions against heat-related illnesses. India declares a heat wave whenever maximum temperatures
BIGGER ROLE: Beijing has said it maintains an impartial stance on the war in Ukraine, but by training Russian troops, China is far more involved than previously known China’s armed forces secretly trained about 200 Russian military personnel in China late last year, and some have since returned to fight in Ukraine, according to three European intelligence agencies and documents seen by Reuters. While China and Russia have held a number of joint military exercises since Moscow’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022, Beijing has repeatedly said that it is neutral in the conflict and presents itself as a peace mediator. The covert training sessions, which predominantly focused on the use of drones, were outlined in a dual-language Russian-Chinese agreement signed by senior Russian and Chinese officers in Beijing on
RSS