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riday noon prayer last week was business as usual, mostly. The preacher started off by clarifying that voting for a non-Muslim political candidate, even though they are obviously more competent, is '€œputting worldly pleasures ahead of God'€.

That'€™s a gold mine right there, but it'€™s not what this letter is about. It was what he said next that got to me. He started talking about the recent eclipse. He exclaimed, without a trace of irony, that it was proof of God'€™s power; that He was able to put the sun and the moon so close together, one in front of the other, '€œwithout them crashing into each other'€.

I spent the rest of the sermon tuning out and contemplating, and refusing to accept that he also probably believed with all his heart that the sun and the moon revolved around the Earth. This Neanderthal thinking is unfortunately very common among the religious right, especially in Indonesia. People embrace stupidity and ignorance because they'€™re afraid they might not go to Heaven otherwise. Knowledge is useless, because all the knowledge you need is in your religion. People believe whatever they hear if they think it will get them into Heaven.

People say the Higgs Boson was an evil atheist idea to replace God (people who have evidently never read anything on the Higgs Boson beyond the misnomer '€œGod Particle'€). People say HIV is created from human sperm mixing with fecal matter. Just recently we had students who, in all honesty, were definitely taught that drugs are sinful but probably weren'€™t taught what drugs actually are '€” resulting in them unknowingly accepting ecstasy that their teacher told them were prayer vitamins.

This is the result of a country where people think that being a good person is better than being an intelligent person. Which can be true, in some ways, but the people of this country very much like to associate being good with being religious. Couple that with the unhealthy attitudes some people take from religion in general and we have a time bomb on our hands. Most of us have probably heard people talking about '€œupholding rationality'€ with the same tone they use to talk about '€œworshipping Satan'€. These people talk about how science is seeking to disprove the existence of God, as if faith and rationality have to be mutually exclusive.

Mohammad Diaz Praditya
Jakarta