Friday, October 07, 2016

Insulting?


The guy in the picture is 30 year old Dutch citizen Klaas Haytema; he was arrested recently in Mandalay, Myanmar (Burma) for "insulting" the Buddhist religion. Apparently he unplugged an amplifier in a building next to the hotel he was staying in because the loud broadcast was preventing him sleeping; he didn't realise that the building was some kind of religious venue and what was being broadcast was some kind of sermon. Clearly the religious predilection for "taking offence" is alive and well in the far East as it is in the rest of the world, it seems that the more hard-line and unreasonable the religion then the more "offence" that is taken, over the slightest thing. Perhaps the home office should construct a table of "petulance points" that helps travellers assess the level of immaturity and downright unreasonableness of the dominant religion in countries around the world, then we could all simply avoid the more stupid ones, leaving them to rot in their safe little cocoons of delusion.

Difficult to generalise of course as there are thousands of religions that vary from country to country but just from the volume and volatility of stories I read about them, here's my starter for 10...



No comments: