Abdul Rahman, a 41-year old Afghan man, is being charged with converting to Christianity. Guess what the punishment is if (when) he’s convicted. Death. The prosecutor offered to drop the charge if he converted back to Islam, but Rahman declined.
Not surprisingly, the number of Christians in Afghanistan is believed to number in the dozens, possibly hundreds.
Could this be more absurd? It’s not just the lack of religious freedom that I find disturbing, but the extreme nature of the method used to deny any deviation from what has been deemed the correct path.
Sorry to burst your bubble, but this kind of punishment isn’t new. Jews, Muslims, and Christians (and probably more, but I’m not that knowledgeable about Asian/African religions) have all been given the “convert or die” option many times in the past and as long as totalitarian religious governments exist, they’ll continue to be given it.
I second what Cid said, and while doing so I totally agree that it’s pretty fucked up. But, like Cid said, it’s nothing new and it’s not going away any time soon. In Japan during the time of the Tokugawa regime, This kind of thing happened all the time.
That’s kind of exactly the point, Cid. It’s not new, it’s so old it should be outdated. On the other hand,
The trial is believed to be the first of its kind in Afghanistan and highlights a struggle between religious conservatives and reformists over what shape Islam should take here four years after the ouster of teh Islamic fundamentalist Taliban government.
Quote taken from an article in the Philadelphia Inquirer (Mon, March 20, 2006), by Daniel Cooney.
Didn’t we go after the Taliban partly to stop this kind of shit from happening?
So should famine in third-world countries, but that’s not happening anytime soon. Just because some of us have moved on doesn’t mean the entire world is on the same page we are.
I think the point of this story is that Afgahanistan, a nation liberated and praised for making some progress towards Western modern society still has some holdovers from its past. Had the nation been Iran, no one would’ve cared.
I’m curious about which part of Afgahanistan it happened in though. Kabul sounds better than this, so I’m willing to bet it’s one of the warlord controlled areas.
Methinks that this still won’t actually deter Christians there. If anything, it’ll make 'em martyrs. “Religion flourishes under oppression” and all that.