Indonesia bans forced religious attire in schools | Hacker News Reader

Indonesia bans forced religious attire in schools

bbc.com

183 pointshassanahmad108 comments

I remember the first time I went to Indonesia, back around 2005 or so, a work trip to the small island of Batam, a ferry ride from Singapore.

When Indonesian colleagues there met me for the first time, they would almost always ask what religion I practiced, in the same sort of casual way as people in the Western world might ask where you lived. I thought it was a bit weird!

Anyway, I'd always say "no religion", since I don't practice or believe in any gods, afterlife etc - but this was totally incomprehensible! Heads would tilt, and I'd get baffled looks like I was mad - "uh... no, but what god you you follow?". No matter how many times or ways I said it, they just didn't seem to believe me.

Someone later explained that in Indonesia you legally had to tell the government what religion you followed, and "none" was not an option.

>Someone later explained that in Indonesia you legally had to tell the government what religion you followed, and "none" was not an option.

That is correct, furthermore, the government only acknowledges 6 religions, although I heard that they started acknowledging some folks religion recently.

It's an interesting contrast to here in the US where you're assumed Christian, and certain sects actively try to force everyone (including other Christians) to live by their specific beliefs. I'd take confusion at not following any god over anger at not following a specific version of one.

That’s really not been my experience. I don’t think I have had a religious conversation or even a question outside my immediate family in the last decade. The US is a huge country and you will experience vastly different things in different areas.

I didn’t experience anything like the grandparent post even in places with higher proportions of religious people in the US. I even attended catholic and Lutheran schools as a kid, and no one cared about my religion (or lack of).

A number of people at my small company refer to their church or make other casual statements that affirm their participation of religion. I have no real problem with this (I'm atheist). However, a guy who does some work for the owner and is remote from somewhere in the center of the country recently posted some very hardcore and, in my opinion, inappropriate statements in our company Slack.

He was responding to someone announcing that their family member tested positive for C19. He came with this, "The Lord blah blah and He will save with His grace yadda yadda." I consider that pretty far over the line of good taste at the workplace, even if well intentioned. Especially given that there are people on staff whose religious beliefs are unknown to me, but who come from parts of the world where Christianity is not dominant.

It doesn't bother me if a person says they'll pray for someone's recovery, for example. But the way he displayed an assumption of the superiority of his religion to others really rubbed me the wrong way. Luckily, there's no overlap in our roles and therefore no need to interact. I can just ignore him and pretend that didn't just happen.

I don't know where you're from, but referencing a prayer in response to hearing that someone was infected with a dangerous disease isn't "far over the line of good taste." To those who are religious, it's core to their identity, and their prayer doesn't affect you at all unless you're religious, then it would be seen as very supportive.

> referencing a prayer in response to hearing that someone was infected with a dangerous disease isn't "far over the line of good taste."

I don't know if you deliberately misconstrued my words or not. I specifically said this:

> It doesn't bother me if a person says they'll pray for someone's recovery, for example.

What I found "over the line of good taste at the workplace" was this sort of statement:

> "The Lord blah blah and He will save with His grace yadda yadda."

"I'll pray," is non-specific. Getting into the details of one's religion ("God is male, in fact He's Jesus") bothers me. Maybe God is female. Maybe God has another name. Getting specific invalidates the beliefs of others.

And, once again, I am atheist. I don't believe in a supernatural creator. I just don't appreciate the assumption that one's superstitions are more correct than others.

I'm sorry, I guess I don't understand. Why does it bother you when people express beliefs different from yours, and how do their beliefs affect you?

It’s not a religious belief being expressed that’s at issue. People don’t want to hear specifics about your beliefs any more than they want to hear about your sex life, personal fetishes, or bowl movements.

I'm truly sorry that hearing a prayer is equal to hearing of someone's shit to you. When you hear it, please understand that it's merely a show of support by them. Their culture probably doesn't think it's unkempt for such a personal display to be made to another person.

When "none" is not an option, you can go for:

> What religion? Pastafarian

> What God do you follow? FSM

i would like to say i believe in milton Friedman

This is true. One of my in-laws' neighbor practice a religion not included in the official list of recognized religions, so he just register himself as a muslim instead. Ultimately, this field doesn't really matter though in day to day life, and might be removed entirely in the future.

> Someone later explained that in Indonesia you legally had to tell the government what religion you followed, and "none" was not an option.

While Indonesia is not a muslim country, believe in God is actually included in its foundational philosophy, and thus hammered into your head as part of your education since primary school. You can believe any god, but not believing any god is definitely strange here and many people would have trouble accepting that.

> Indonesia has banned public schools from making religious attire compulsory, after the story of a Christian student being pressured to wear a headscarf in class went viral.

A small victory for liberty to offset the setback in Myanmar. The other ASEAN [1] countries have an opportunity to improve liberty as the rest of the world backslides into protectionism and authoritarianism.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ASEAN

Then, this is not about forcing religious attire... it is about forcing a religion since that person was not even from that religion.

Freedom from the demands of religion tends to only really evolve in the context of freedom of religion, at the edges that form where people are practicing different religions that have conflicting access needs.

It’s similar to how accessibility measures get implemented: you need a vocal group that’s disparately affected, and who needs the change in order to function properly, before anyone will bother to change how they do things. You need a “lobby.”

Religious freedom is an accessibility need where “functioning properly” means “being able to adhere to the tenets of their own religious beliefs.” So the friction responsible for change only comes up where you have a “lobby” of people of another religion, where that other religion has a conflicting requirement.

The situation where an individual or group of individuals need to petition another group of individuals, to change the status quo so the first group can function - is broken.

Just a reminder that utilitarianism wrongs the minority group by definition, and is barbaric.

It's a good ruling, but framing it as good news masks the fact that the law is only necessary because intolerance and religious coercion is growing at the social and local level. It was passed in direct response to a videotaped incident.

"Good news" doesn't have to mean "the overall trends are good". Something good can happen among a trend of bad things, and acknowledging the good thing doesn't mean denying the bad things.

This is good news. Indonesia has been on a road to become quite intolerant of other religions over the past years with some very tragic outcomes like lynchings. I have little hope that this is a sign of that process slowing down or halting or even reversing, but a win is a win I guess.

They just whipped two gay men in the streets after a burglar broke into their home and caught them in bed together.

A win is a win but this isn’t a huge milestone IMHO.

Are you and GP thinking of all Indonesia or just Aceh?

Aceh is especially bad, but it's happening outside of Aceh as well. There's mob violence against Christians and non-Sunni muslims, they imprisoned a Christian governor of Jakarta over "blasphemy", the state pretty much does not hire non-muslims anymore.

You should update/add your information source. There has been many non moslems, including Christian, become minister or governor or head of city/town all over Indonesia. Since its independence until now. In the beginning of current presidential period (2019-2024) there were 5 ministers as a Christian. However last year 1 is replaced due to unpopular take on COVID-19 handling and another 1 is sacked due to corruption on social programs during Jakarta’s lockdown last year. Even the governor you talked about is now becoming a commissioner for a state owned oil company. Imagine. someone out of jail, a Christian but hold a prestigious position in a state owned oil company.

Points taken. It's not all bad, it's nowhere near the intolerance we see in some other countries. I'm just extra concerned about Indonesia because it used to be a very tolerant country. And it's not just through news about how the government wants to ban 'gay emojis', I have friends who live(d) there and/or have family there and they also tell me about how there are preachers from Saudi Arabia walking around in the kampungs teaching a far stricter version of Islam.

https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/asia/indonesia-bans...

afaik Aceh and Jakarta are worlds apart in terms of diversity/tolerance.

Indonesia's Aceh flogs two men for having sex [1]:

> They were reported by neighbours back in November.

> The two men, aged 27 and 29, winced in pain as they were whipped by robed and masked enforcers who lashed the men on their backs with a rattan stick.

Perhaps "robed" was conflated with "robbed". Appalling nonetheless:

> This is believed to be the third time gay men have been caned in Aceh since Islamic laws outlawing homosexuality were introduced in 2015.

[1] https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-55846699

Say what you will, this isn't too different to what ex-gay/re-education that is happening in a lot of western countries is doing to children on the behalf of evangelism/religion, they just don't bother hiding it.

I wonder about the amount of unrecorded cases though, that "3 since 2015" number seems a bit weird, but I'm not 100% knowledged about the social dynamics in Indonesia.

You seriously compare severe physical punishment with voluntary courses and meetings?

Shunning [1] can be devastating and is used as a powerful alternative to physical punishment in pacifist communities like Anabaptists (e.g. Mennonites and Amish). Shunning is like a chronic disease while caning is acute.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shunning

People have the right to decide who they associate with. Communities and organizations have a right to decide who they allow into them.

Shunning is very effective in enforcing community standards and behavior. It is one of the fundamental mechanisms inherent to any and all communities. At your job you can get fired. If you contribute to a dev project you must abide the CoC, and if you're a member of some cult or some community like Amish you have to live by community standards or you can go live by whatever standards you want with people that want to live that way with you. It can be devastating, but it is not wrong.

If you think that conversion therapy is voluntary in most cases, you're delusional.

There's a lot of outside pressure involved and often, you don't really have a chance but to give into that until you can leave your whole family and existing social infrastructure behind.

I think he's seriously downplaying how awful the public canings are, but you're seriously downplaying how awful conversion therapy is.

It's like

    bad|-----caning------conversion_therapy-----|good

and you're making it sound like

    bad|-----caning----------conversion_therapy-|good

Which is total bullshit. Voluntary courses and meetings, my ass.

I think it's pointless to view it as some sort of competition of awfulness, but you should know that the worst of the conversion therapy places were way more evil than this jaunty characterization. Some of them were using their own invented version of "electro shock therapy" that functionally was just torturing kids.

Even the more mild places do things to kids that leads to life long mental health challenges. It shouldn't be trivialized away as all just being a friendly chat among consenting adults.

> this isn't too different to what ex-gay/re-education that is happening in a lot of western countries

Both are illiberal as they punish behavior between consenting adults but extreme corporal punishment is a different level in the spectrum, in my opinion. Singapore is an advanced nation state that canes criminals [1]. One does not have to be for illegal drug trafficking, for instance, to be against caning.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Caning_in_Singapore

I think it should be a choice given to the convict. Imprisonment, maybe for months or years, or intense pain and life long scaring, but you get to go home at the end of the day and don't spend a significant fraction of your only life in a cell. Depending on the length of the prison sentence, I would opt for the caning.

I know this is an unpopular opinion, but I do believe that imprisonment is less humane than corporal punishment, so long as the corporal punishment does not maim, is in line with the crime, and there are no victimless crimes punished with corporal punishment. So for example, I'd be opposed to the death penalty for drug trafficking as it is in Singapore, or the removal of limbs for theft as it is in SA, or any punishment whatsoever for homosexuality, but putting someone in a cage for 10 years for selling crack, or even for armed robbery, separating them from their children who have to grow up without a parent, putting them into a dangerous environment made entirely up of criminals and having to adapt a perpetually criminal and defensive mindset, to me that is more barbaric than beating someone. It is a difficult thing to reason on but it is important to do so.

> this isn't too different to what ex-gay/re-education that is happening in a lot of western countries is doing to children

It's significantly worse, and, besides, conversion "therapy" is not happening in a lot of western countries. Here in western Europe it's unheard of.

> Here in western Europe it's unheard of.

Completely untrue.

https://www.pinknews.co.uk/2020/11/09/conversion-therapy-ban...

https://www.independent.co.uk/voices/graham-linehan-trans-ge...

Any society that feels it needs to publicly torture its citizens as punishment is simply barbarism.

I wonder which country hasn’t had public executions in the last 250 years...

Why 250? It seems arbitrarily far in the past.

As a way to compare societies and their values, it seems to me best to exclude the distant past when everyone was basically unaware of their neighbors, and use something like "since tv in most homes", or better yet, "since internet available to most".

There's far less excuses in today's globalized world to justify cultural relativism.

> There's far less excuses in today's globalized world to justify cultural relativism.

I look forward to a rigorous justification from first principles for the moral values of Western secular humanism.

I will not entertain that

"no public execution > public executions", or

"no street gay flogging > street gay floggings",

need to be rigorously justified from first principle.

I think that could be even further generalized to:

> Any society that feels it needs to torture is simply barbarism.

Do you believe that locking people in a cage for years of their life, separating them from their families, and putting them in an environment where they must be afraid perpetually or hone criminal skills to protect themselves to be humane? Not being hyperbolic, just detailed.

Aceh is different. They were fighting for independence from 1975 onwards. When the Tsunami end of 2004 it aceh the strongest (pretty bad), both sides compromised, allowing aceh to be the only region of Indonesia under sharia law.

What about Kalimantan? I've been to Kota Kinabalu (many years ago) and the social difference compared to Kuala Lumpur was striking. I assumed Kalimantan was socially more similar to its island neighbors. Official laws and social norms do not always align.

Actually I do not know. Kalimantan is the Indonesian part of Borneo, while Kota Kinabalu is on the Malaysian part of Borneo. Generally Malaysia is more conservative than indonesia. Even in KL Muslims are banned from buying alcohol, while in Indonesia that's not generally the case.

It is because of all that stuff that this is a huge milestone! Like, that means that the faction there that wants to preserve people's rights has won a pretty significant victory against the faction that wants to whip gay people.

These two groups are highly unlikely to have any overlap.

There is some degree of group attribution error in your comment that is making it hard for you to tease signal out of events. But I suppose whether something is a milestone or not is sort of subjective when you're temporally proximate to the event. So I'll leave off.

That was in Aceh. Aceh is crazytown, even for someone like me who was raised in a heavily orthodox Muslim family.

Aceh is maybe Saudi Arabia x2.

The framing is odd though describing it as "forced" instead of simply the school's dress code. Especially when comparing it to a case in Britain a few weeks ago where a girl was threatened [1] with legal action because her skirt was 'too long'. Or how france forces girls to remove their hijabs [2]. One can always find rhetoric to justify one's decision, what I find odd tho is how a group of people will use words like "forced" in one case but will bend over backwards to justify the same forced rulings with more euphemistic language when it's in favor of their own worldview. You'll hear "it's just the law" kind of excuses, while not realizing that their own arguments could easily be used to justify the opposing case as well.

[1] https://www.theguardian.com/education/2021/jan/12/school-thr...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Islamic_scarf_controversy_in_F...

I imagine this is because we are dealing with a people who feel that they are morally superior than the rest of the world due to worldly advantage and dominance.

Whether or not this school was correct in their dress code [1] is shadowed by the immediate conclusion for many that “Islam = Bad, oppressive, unfair, archaic” the moment that it ceases to be just an “internal, private belief for some” and becomes an external way of life that sovereign countries implement in their own territories. This is so even if what a country is implementing is not congruent to the tenants of Islam (see, the flogging of the Homosexuals for example).

Let them (viz. The West) tell it, the sociocultural climate of their localities are in exemplary order.

[1]: I see no issue with private institutions enforcing a dress code that makes the hijab mandatory. Non-muslim students need not attend and even to force them to wear it would obfuscate the intent of the hijab. It is far more than just a cloth that is draped over the head of any woman and its virtue is neglected so long as its wearer is void of virtue herself.

“Non-muslim students need not attend and even to force them to wear it would obfuscate the intent of the hijab.”

hear hear. now imagine the uproar if christians would have said “non christians need not attend” [insert anything].

By what logic would a person enroll their child into a private institute that enforces a non-arbitrary code that they disagree with?

I see no problem with a private Catholic school saying “If you’re not Catholic and have an issue with what we enforce here (e.g. dress codes), then you should enroll your children here.” I imagine that’s what they all would say.

If I didn’t make it clear, this applies appropriately to private institutions, meaning “you are enrolling here on your own conscious accord.”

If a person has any issues with how a private academic institute operates, then they are not mandated to attend it. Furthermore there is a difference between blatant discrimination (“No non-Christians allowed”) vs. "there is a particular culture that is being observed here; we aren’t going to bar anyone from attending this establishment, but it’s illogical to expect us to bend to your will because you are in opposition to what we practice upon you joining."

Meanwhile Quebec banned religious attire for government servants which disproportionately affects Muslim women.

Are we allowed to force kids to a curriculum? If you say "yes", then what is wrong with forcing kids to a dress code? Why is force ok in one sense and not in another?

Why is it ok to force your kid to eat breakfast in the morning but not ok to force them to do <insert horrible thing>.

Why is it ok to force kids to remove their hijabs but not ok to force them to do <insert horrible thing>.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Islamic_scarf_controversy_in_F...

you've presumed that forcing kids to a dress code is horrible. it isn't horrible. it's just that you (seem to not) value modesty in dress, which they do.

The problem is this was done is a public school, funded by taxpayer money. Although most of its population are muslim, Indonesia is not an islamic country (except Aceh, which is a special region with its own laws and autonomous government), so the public schools must accommodate every religion recognized by the country (there are 6 of them). If it's happening in a private school (e.g. islamic boarding schools or catholic schools), no one would bat an eye.

I'd like to recommend this book: The Jakarta Method[0].

Essentially, the US aided in the dismantling of a free democratic society in favor of a coup and a military dictatorship. Examples of the same being done in other countries are also provided. This was in service of obtaining natural resources.

Disclaimer: It's politics are very left of center.

[0] https://www.amazon.com/Jakarta-Method-Washingtons-Anticommun...

This has absolutely nothing to do with hacking and Indonesian school uniform regulations hardly count as "intellectually gratifying".

Even if I wanted to learn more about school uniforms in a country I've never been to, whose language and culture I know nothing about, why the hell would I read about it coming from the state media of a another country I've never been to, whose journalists also know nothing about the language, culture, and political situation there?

Relax. It’s good news. Women deserve way more respect than they get. This is a welcome change in just one pocket of the world.

Exactly, now we need schools in Britain to respect women more, instead of persecuting them for wearing skirts that are 'too long'.

https://www.theguardian.com/education/2021/jan/12/school-thr...

It's not "news" at all. Have you ever been to Indonesia? Do you speak Indonesian? Have you even interacted with any Indonesians? Have ever read a book in Indonesian? Neither you or I have any contextual information to qualify this as good or bad news. We sure as hell shouldn't trust the BBC of all people to give us that contextual information either.

The only reason people on HN care is because it's framed as a part of some weird culture/religious war. This constant projection of values on people you know nothing about is a waste time at best.

Culture doesn’t enjoy a special force field against criticism and scrutiny. And humanity transcends geography. Women the world over are entitled to respect and truly equal rights, not mere lip service. FWIW:

https://www.hrw.org/world-report/2019/country-chapters/indon...

> Culture doesn’t enjoy a special force field against criticism and scrutiny.

Never said it did. I'm simply not interested in hearing uninformed "criticism" from someone who knows absolutely nothing about what they're criticizing, made with ulterior motives.

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