Religious Tolerance in Malaysia

It is interesting to me that while Malaysia is considered a tolerant nation it has banned an entire sect of a religion. To me this is not religious tolerance. They do have their reasons for the intolerance though. I would want to look back into their history of religious tolerance and the acts of Shiites. What I would hope to gain from doing so is more insight as to the reason behind banning the Shiites, whether it is based off of past cases of disturbances or if it is a preemptive precautionary measure. I also noticed that Judaism was not mentioned. I was not sure if this was due to a non-existent Jewish presence or if the Jews are also persecuted there. So I did my research. There are only about 100 Jews in Malaysia according to Wikipedia. The CIA World Fact Book reports that 2.3% of the population declares its religion as “other” “unknown” or “none” as of the 2000 census (which I don’t quite know how a person could not know his or her religion, but apparently it is an option). I feel like this Malaysia course is really going to open my eyes to the state of the world. It is one thing to read about oppression, third world, ethnic disputes, etc. but it will be quite the drastically different experience to be in Malaysia having grown up here in New England.

So here’s the article: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2011/01/14/AR2011011401126.html

Well, while I was on the CIA WFB website I figured I would read some more about Malaysia. The education life of a child is expected to last 13 years with males at 12 years and females at 13 years. I found that intriguing. I would expect it to be the other way around, so props to Malaysia for that. I also found that while at birth a child is more likely to be male, an elderly person is more likely to be female (females have a longer life expectancy by 6 years!). Finally, only 5.1% of the population is below the poverty, which is less than half of what we have here in the U.S. That is an impressive figure and quite unexpected.

It cold and snowy here with a storm about twice a week. I love it, but a lot of people are complaining (especially those from Cali or Florida)