One of the things we are often told when it comes to the role of organised belief in society is that it is an inalienable right to hold personal belief (which I more or less agree with), and that faith is personal.
Organised belief is not personal. No-one seems particularly content to just get on with life and mind their own business. Here is one example;
Facebook is like the rest of the internet but with a much more condensed percentage of the stupid and the hateful. One of the things Facebook is perhaps good for is the establishment of communities, pages for the like-minded to get together, share jokes and interesting tid-bits of news, and generally have a lend of everyone and everything the community doesn't like.
This is pretty straightforward. It's what happens when any group of 2 or more human beings gets together. What Facebook has also perfected is the hate crime community. Given their lax and quixotic reporting system and protocols, it is more than possible to create communities dedicated to hate, rape and murder, just don't show a woman breastfeeding. Facebook seems to be pretty calm with hate, rape and murder, but quite puritan when showing a mammary gland performing its biological duty.
So we come to the Malay Facebook community 'Pendedahan Eksklusif-Siapa Sebenarnya Sitt Al Wuzara'. This community's purpose is to spread hatred for homosexuals, atheists and most commonly murtad people (Apostates of Islam). They tend to do one of two things - constantly post the pages of atheist groups or murtad support groups with calls to report them, and sometimes post the names and addresses of people they know or even suspect to be murtad.
The exhortation there is clear. Where a person is known or suspected to be murtad, then the duty of the muslim is clear - beating and/or murder must ensue. Apparently this page has been reported multiple times for exhorting hate crime, and yet it is still there. Meanwhile, it's hard to know how many of the pages Pendedahan Eksklusif has reported have been shut down. Facebook's overt collusion with hypocrisy makes any statistics on this difficult to find. It is also not that the pages they call on to be reported are propagating hate. Most are just ideologically opposed. When an atheist group is targeted, it is blackly humorous to see those atheists jumping onto the Wall of Pendedahan Eksklusif and slinging back jibes and barbs. When they call on murtad groups or personal pages to be shut down, they are isolating and persecuting innocent people.
Murtad support groups are necessary. In many countries, one does not simply stop being a muslim. It may be illegal to convert. Often it carries a death penalty. The Quran issues a death sentence for such conversion, an injunction many states are only to eager to uphold. While believers are welcome to their faith, for whatever reason it sustains them, the use of that faith as a platform for beatings, rape and murder is, in any understanding, wrong. It is low, barbaric and brutal. If you cannot hold a friend with love, then hate is going to be a poor substitute.
This is not just about Islam. I have no doubts that if you swapped out all the Islamic references on Pendedahan Eksklusif for Christian ones, that you would mirror many extant Facebook communities. If faith, as the believers tell us, is about love and compassion, then show it. The strong beating and murdering the weak is not loving or compassionate, it is tyrannical and evil.
Social networks like Facebook are filled with communities championing various belief systems and ideologies. It is to be expected that clashes of opinion will happen. The various sorties of barbed commentary on opposing pages (trolling in short) is obnoxious and annoying, but common enough to be expected. They troll you, you flame them, then jump onto their page to troll them, and on and on ad nauseum. But it is part of the game that just because you don't like someone you don't shut them up, or shut their page down. And you certainly do not use pages or communities as a handy directory to commit real-life violence.
To the faithful, we live in the 21st century. Your faith has a lot to deal with. The claims of faith are increasingly impoverished when dealing with scientific truths. The morality of faith is outdated, dispassionate and cruel. Society is growing increasingly secular. Resentment to religious intrusion on social governance is rising. You can still be part of society, you can still retain your faith if you choose to, but you must learn that your beliefs DO NOT give you any right to persecute, punish or pillory anyone else. If you can learn to do that, then maybe we can learn to respect your beliefs. Until then I will show any religious person who incites hate crime the same tolerance I would show anyone else who incites hate crime - absolutely none. While you do these heinous acts, you deserve to be treated like any brute who enjoys tormenting and torturing the vulnerable.
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