Plain stupid not to return Bibles – Ravinder Singh

The Selangor Islamic Religious Council (Mais) and Selangor Islamic Religious Department (Jais) can destroy the 321 Bibles if they are so adamant on doing so, but will that obliterate the word Allah from not only the Bible but also from the hearts and minds of the millions of Christians and others who are using that word in their prayers?

The Jihad or holy war that is being waged by Mais and Jais over such a stupid idea that not returning the Bibles will be a great victory for them only makes these bodies the proverbial empty drums that make the most noise. They also remind me of Don Quixote’s “righteous war” that he believed was “service to God”. To quote from Wikipedia:

In the novel, Don Quixote fights windmills that he imagines to be giants. Quixote sees the windmill blades as the giant's arms, for instance. A relevant portion of the novel states:

Just then they came in sight of thirty or forty windmills that rise from that plain. And no sooner did Don Quixote see them that he said to his squire, "Fortune is guiding our affairs better than we ourselves could have wished. Do you see over yonder, friend Sancho, thirty or forty hulking giants? I intend to do battle with them and slay them. With their spoils we shall begin to be rich for this is a righteous war and the removal of so foul a brood from off the face of the earth is a service God will bless."

"What giants?" asked Sancho Panza.

"Those you see over there," replied his master, "with their long arms. Some of them have arms well nigh two leagues in length."

"Take care, sir," cried Sancho. "Those over there are not giants but windmills. Those things that seem to be their arms are sails which, when they are whirled around by the wind, turn the millstone."

The real abode of the word “Allah” used by the Christians and those of other faiths is in the hearts and minds of these people and not on paper in the form of the pages of the Bible or other holy texts.

You burn the 321 copies in your hands, but there are millions of others all over the place, and more will be printed. And in the IT world, just press a few keys and you have the whole Bible on the screen.

So the next thing Mais and Jais must do is destroy the Internet. But to date they have not raised a finger or whispered a word to do so. Are Muslims not using computers?

Why have they not raided the Malaysian Communications and Multimedia Commission (MCMC) to shut down the Internet?

Haven’t Mais and Jais got any grey matter to have the common sense knowledge that any Muslim can access the full Bible and other religious texts on the Internet wherever they are? What strategies have they laid out to prevent Muslims accessing Bibles on line?

If Mais and Jais want to see all non-Muslims stop using the word Allah, they have to do more than just burn the 321 copies of the Bibles. They must gouge out the hearts and minds of these people and throw them into the incinerator and replace them with artificial hearts and minds that will only pump the blood and hold no concepts and ideas, least of all the word Allah.

Come to think of it, persons who are so adamant on pursuing some stupid idea have to be mentally sick to the core. With their faculties of reasoning so numbed by thoughts of religious superiority over all others, they feel they are beings of a superior kind who are God’s appointees to lord over the rest of mankind.

Isn’t it blasphemous for them to act contrary to the teachings of the very religion they noisily claim to be protecting and defending? What a shame they bring to the beautiful religion of Islam as preached by the prophet.

The antics of Mais and Jais should make an interesting case study for psychologists to study how the conditioning of human minds through wrongful teachings of religion can result in the teachings of the prophets of a religion being turned on its head by zealots out to achieve their personal objectives under cover of religion.

* Ravinder Singh reads The Malaysian Insider.