Practising Catholicism in Saudi Arabia | Hacker News Reader

Practising Catholicism in Saudi Arabia

expatriates.stackexchange.com

19 pointsnsaparanoid19 comments

The most interesting thing about this post is pointing out the existence of https://expatriates.stackexchange.com.

yeah, that was one of the reasons as well. I posted the top level site for interest, but it didn't seem to get much attention. I feel like it'd be really handy for hackernews, given how many are transient workers (like myself). Guess we'll see how it goes.

Yes, I looked around a bit, and most of the questions asked and answered on that site don't apply to me, even though I'm on the move.

Theres an evangelist named Zakir Naik who has a large following among muslims. In one of his videos he gives a hilarious justification for this policy.

Apparently , Muslims are 100 % sure that their religion is the correct one and just as we wouldn't allow a Math teacher to tell her students that 2 + 2 equals five , an Islamic country cannot allow other religions to exist.

He said this without any hint of irony.

Why are you so surprised that someone believes their beliefs are 100% true.

Have you not been exposed to people who actually believe in things before?

He completely ignored or sidestepped the fact that non muslim countries could apply the same policy to muslims.

From his perspective, they are in the wrong in the first place for practising a religion other than Islam. Thus, they would not be right in applying this standard for Muslims, but must instead convert (interestingly, Muslims call this 'reverting') themselves.

I am not a Muslim, but grew up amongst many of the faith.

The Saudi government sound like a wonderful group of people who are quite comfortable with their own religious beliefs and would never go about doing anything irrational to those who take a different view.

No, you'd only expect someone full of doubt and cognitive dissonance to go about arresting people who celebrate other religions. Not these guys!

How does this apply to HN? HN now seems to be more politics than technology unfortunately.

Well, the fact that HN changed might be true, but you might want to read the guidelines again:

"On-Topic: Anything that good hackers would find interesting. That includes more than hacking and startups. If you had to reduce it to a sentence, the answer might be: anything that gratifies one's intellectual curiosity."

Having this sort if insight about the legal implications of practicing some religion in Saudi Arabia might be relevant to some people here. Anyways, we will soon know if this is "HN worthy". Upvotes and downvotes are here for a reason.

I'm usually very inclusionist about what's appropriate for HN, but this thing has absolutely no place here. Even from a sociological point of view the article doesn't offer anything of value. We already know that Saudi Arabia is a deplorable place, however, that's not what the SO question is about.

The argument that hackers sometimes are devout Catholics (or Muslims for that matter) isn't enough in my opinion to justify this as a piece of interest.

It's worse than politics, it's religion. These topics are a magnet for defective behavior and threads like these have little chance of being productive.

What do you have to do to get downvote permissions?

Talk about random Saudi Arabia facts and so and so's blog on how great broccoli is?

I am kinda happy to know about expatriates on stack exchange, since I current am a Canadian expat. So... the system works I guess.

I found it interesting and it brought to my mind something I hadn't thought about before. Isn't that what HN is for? New, interesting stuff?

I go elsewhere for constant stories about the US government's overreach and other social commentary. This site used to have mainly deep technical stories, now it is mainly used to soundboard about how awful the NSA and government is and the like. The site has become really a lot less enjoyable since then IMO.

Well, the world have a lot of people, and some of them post stuff on HN. Then some other people vote on them ;)

Start a more focused site?

I'd go.

Fix the expired pages issue.

everything is politics.

Please go back to reading Cheeseburger or (Insert 'geek' blog here). In the real world developers travel for their work, often visiting places with down right frightening laws! (Dubai, Saudi, Africa; You get the picture)

I'd imagine this story is of high importance to any developer (Even non Christian ones) as it highlights just how careful you need to be when traversing that neck of the woods.

At first I thought you made this account just to do drive-by ad hominems, but looking at your history it seems that assumption was wrong.

I'm not sure you fully realize what you're doing when you write stuff like

> Please go back to reading Cheeseburger or (Insert 'geek' blog here).

You have absolutely no business to come here and 5 days in tell people to go fuck themselves. My primary complaint isn't even the fatuitous nature of that comment, it's the intent behind it. Someone might have expressed an opinion you don't like - and I get that you might feel your religion isn't getting properly respected - but that's no reason to attack them personally.

Next time, please just leave that attack out.

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