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.”
POLITICAL PRISONERS VS DEPORTEES: Venezuela’s prosecutor’s office slammed the call by El Salvador’s leader, accusing him of crimes against humanity Salvadoran President Nayib Bukele on Sunday proposed carrying out a prisoner swap with Venezuela, suggesting he would exchange Venezuelan deportees from the US his government has kept imprisoned for what he called “political prisoners” in Venezuela. In a post on X, directed at Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro, Bukele listed off a number of family members of high-level opposition figures in Venezuela, journalists and activists detained during the South American government’s electoral crackdown last year. “The only reason they are imprisoned is for having opposed you and your electoral fraud,” he wrote to Maduro. “However, I want to propose a humanitarian agreement that
ECONOMIC WORRIES: The ruling PAP faces voters amid concerns that the city-state faces the possibility of a recession and job losses amid Washington’s tariffs Singapore yesterday finalized contestants for its general election on Saturday next week, with the ruling People’s Action Party (PAP) fielding 32 new candidates in the biggest refresh of the party that has ruled the city-state since independence in 1965. The move follows a pledge by Singaporean Prime Minister Lawrence Wong (黃循財), who took office last year and assumed the PAP leadership, to “bring in new blood, new ideas and new energy” to steer the country of 6 million people. His latest shake-up beats that of predecessors Lee Hsien Loong (李顯龍) and Goh Chok Tong (吳作棟), who replaced 24 and 11 politicians respectively
Young women standing idly around a park in Tokyo’s west suggest that a giant statue of Godzilla is not the only attraction for a record number of foreign tourists. Their faces lit by the cold glow of their phones, the women lining Okubo Park are evidence that sex tourism has developed as a dark flipside to the bustling Kabukicho nightlife district. Increasing numbers of foreign men are flocking to the area after seeing videos on social media. One of the women said that the area near Kabukicho, where Godzilla rumbles and belches smoke atop a cinema, has become a “real
‘WATER WARFARE’: A Pakistani official called India’s suspension of a 65-year-old treaty on the sharing of waters from the Indus River ‘a cowardly, illegal move’ Pakistan yesterday canceled visas for Indian nationals, closed its airspace for all Indian-owned or operated airlines, and suspended all trade with India, including to and from any third country. The retaliatory measures follow India’s decision to suspend visas for Pakistani nationals in the aftermath of a deadly attack by shooters in Kashmir that killed 26 people, mostly tourists. The rare attack on civilians shocked and outraged India and prompted calls for action against their country’s archenemy, Pakistan. New Delhi did not publicly produce evidence connecting the attack to its neighbor, but said it had “cross-border” links to Pakistan. Pakistan denied any connection to