There are some people criticizing a recent report from the US about religious freedom here in Yemen. The Yemenis point to the fact that you can practice any religion you want here. In fact, down in Aden there are 3 Catholic churches, an Anglican church, and a hindu(!) temple. The report points out that there aren’t any churches in the former North Yemen, including Sana’a. The thing that really gets people here is that the report criticized Yemen for making conversion from Islam and proselytizing muslims illegal. I’m pretty sure that converting from Islam is a capital offense, it is by Sharia law certainly. People here have various lame excuses like, “But no one is coerced into becoming a muslim here,” which may be true enough, but God help anyone here that grew up muslim and finds Jesus somehow… All of the defenses basically boil down to, “But we have the correct religion…”Seriously, how can people defend this? I know, it’s in the Koran. I’m sorry, but anyone with any critical reasoning skills can see what a transparent power play this is. Christians gave this up a long time ago. They now have what I believe to be the “correct” view, “Do whatever you like, but you better choose well cause God’s got the final say…” To me, this is the essence of religious freedom, you choose, and you (like everyone) will eventually pay for whatever bad decisions you make throughout life. Why can’t they leave religious “justice” up to God?<\/p>\n
There are some people criticizing a recent report from the US about religious freedom here in Yemen. The Yemenis point to the fact that you can practice any religion you want here. In fact, down in Aden there are 3 Catholic churches, an Anglican church, and a hindu(!) temple. The report points out that there […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[2],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-270","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-yemen"],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/my-yemen-blog.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/270","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/my-yemen-blog.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/my-yemen-blog.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/my-yemen-blog.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/my-yemen-blog.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=270"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/my-yemen-blog.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/270\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/my-yemen-blog.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=270"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/my-yemen-blog.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=270"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/my-yemen-blog.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=270"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}