Between your God and mine!

Goa Inquisition

It is probably due to cognitive dissonance. Finally listening, for once, to what they were saying, they must have had a revelation. It must have sounded so ridiculous that they must have thought of what they were smoking when they plunged head-on into the cult. Hey, heck no! They are not going to denounce everything. They had invested too much time, resources and life to give it away. The next best plan is to convince others. They would get the numbers. It cannot be so wrong if everybody buys their story. And they thought, while we are at it, let us monetise the whole concept!

Hence, the worldwide inquisition started. Because they felt they had been told the inside story about the Creator and thought they knew the backstory of everything's creation, they walked around with a chip on their shoulders.

It is funny how overconfidence leads to aggression. It does not feel wrong to inflict all the pain, injustices and cruelty upon another being because it is viewed as carrying God's will here on Earth. Nobody actually saw the memo or had the guts to ask the same. They risk the label of a heretic.

Another group would take the Word of God and spread it as a religion of peace but with violence and ambush. As if to soothe the bleeding wounds, they would send in nuns and nurses who have dedicated their lives to saving lives. To make the natives useful idiots, schools would be built with the conquerer's belief systems. Servants of God would parachute down to spread the Word and plead with compassion and forgiveness as if trying to whitewash their previous misgivings.

Another method employed to subtly convert the next generation was through the boarding school systems. Horror tales of promising students uprooted from society with the promise of a better life, which ended with tragic ends of torture and death, are rampant in the Australian, Canadian and American aboriginal communities.

Just when you thought this was a footprint of colonial times, think again. Subversive religious conversion of adults and minors has always been ongoing below the radar. Much evangelism work was ongoing under the pretext of providing educational, medical and emotional support. Good for them.

Recently, a video flared up on social media of strategies for converting Malaysian secondary school students and keeping their religious conversion under wraps until they reach adulthood when they are free to profess their religion of choice.

Firdaus Wong is sharing advice on TikTok with teachers
 on converting their students to Islam without their
parent's knowledge. F.B. pic; June 6, 2024.

This naturally created a lot of apprehension amongst parents who saw schools and other governmental institutions as hotbeds for religious activities. Murmurs about this had been in the people's consciousness all this while. Still, everyone naively believed that the Nation had adequate laws to protect people of different belief systems from professing their religion of choice. If formerly conversions were done at the end of the sword, now it is insinuated through subtle reasons like economic prosperity and rebel yells of the ignoramus.

For anyone to trust the legal system, laws must be carried out, and justice must be seen to be done. Over the years, as evidenced by the pile of cases taken up by NGOs against the State, citizens cannot be blamed if they were to think that there exists a sinister plan to subjugate one religion over the others. 

 

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P.S. As any other Indian mother would, Amma was apprehensive when her much-loved son had to spend two years training in a state in the Malay heartland. Her circle of friends constantly told her tales of many promising young Hindu men falling flat for the fauna and flora, fawning over females there, returning home with a different name and surname, spotting moustache-less beards, and refusing to partake in functions deemed necessary by their parents, i.e. final rites and ancestral worship. So, Amma saw a shaman to make an amulet to ward off evil spells. The only restriction to be observed while wearing the amulet was that it should not be worn in places considered unclean with negative energies. Well, what does the shaman expect in a hospital? Of course, there will be deaths, suicides, diseases and all the negativities that need correction! As a good son, yours truly did don the contraption. Expectedly, Amma had thought too highly of her offspring. He fell for the flora and fauna, but there was no inkling of fawning over or by someone!

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