Jeyaraj's Comments

This is in response to the lankanewspaper.com article titled ‘Jeyaraj attacks church hierarchy’ where the current Minister of transportation and so many other things apparently blamed the Catholic Church for it’s apparent support of Ranil.

First of all despite what jeyaraj has to say, majority of the Christian vote did not go for Mahinda, this is quite clear when looking at electorates where there is a Christian majority in the population. Even in his own electorate in Katana, usually a robust clean win for a SLFP backed alliance saw a great narrowing down of the gap between the UNP and the SLFP candidate.

It must be said, that statements near elections are in fact quite a common procedure for the church, where they usually preach about choosing a candidate who can bring peace. This has been the sermon of the church near election times for the past few elections, and if someone actually bothered to read the statement they would notice that even this time around the statement have not deviated from this basic message.

What is true however, is the fact that anyone reading a statement such as that, anything which calls for ‘peace’ over an election period would immediately get the perception that whoever wrote the statement is in support of the UNP. it’s also true that some Christian priests did ask very openly from the public to vote for Ranil, basing their arguments on mahinda’s JHU affiliations among others.

The truth be told, it’s highly unlikely that Christians would face great ‘atrocities’ in the hands of mahinda; after all his wife is a Christian, he sent his kids to a Christian school, and as far as I know, up until now had a pretty healthy relationship with the church.

I, as a Christian and a catholic would personally prefer if the church stayed out of the political process as much as possible, especially in instances where Christians as an entity is not under any sort of great ‘danger’. I strongly believe that religion is a personal thing, and the state and its politics should be separated as much as possible from religion.

However, if a criticism is leveled against the church for influencing the political thinking of its followers then the criticism should also be leveled against all the religious organizations and figures using religion as leverage for political gain, but unfortunately neither Jeyaraj, or anyone else for that matter have the balls enough to say anything against these other, mainly Buddhist religious organizations and figures influencing and participating in mainstream politics.

Cheers
Deane.


p.s – this was supposed to be one of my replies to the actual news story in lankanewspapers, but figured it would be better to just blog it.

Finally.. the Interact site is up..

After like a year since i built this, finally managed to upload the Gateway interact club site, now of course im out of school and out of the club, but the bureaucracy in Gateway is unbelievable, after building the site it took us 2 months to get approval,and then ofcourse i had to sit for ALs and then it was too outdated to upload. Even now this upload is on a free server.

The site is a little buggy, and i also did a pretty dirty job on HTML and as of now it's pretty much outdated, the new Interact board is supposed to send me the content; Hopefully they can get 'permission' for it, and pretty soon the site can move on to paid hosting and get a propper (already paid for) domain running.

Any comments are welcome, i know, the gfx arent that optimized, the HTML is horrible but apart from that.. looks alright huh? :)

hmm.. come to think of it, this is pretty much a pointless blog.. oh.. and probably my first non-political post :) .. wow.. i actually managed to do that..

Ahh.. Rajpal

It’s been a long time since my last post; things have been crazy with exams, Christmas and lot of other stuff. But hell, how often does your blog get referred on mainstream media? I just had to blog this one.

The shocker came yesterday when reading the Rajpal Abeynayake column (of the Sunday Times) where Mr.Rajpal, now back to his usual UNP bashing ways, referred to a blog post I made the day before the November 17 election where I wrote about how Rajpal likes to pinch, slap and punch the UNP, and in particular Ranil and Milinda Moragoda.

So our dear Rajpal is a blog reader (perhaps even a blogger?), must say I’m rather elated about the fact that he referred to the post, more so than I like to admit, and hell I’ve been always curious about knowing who this Rajpal pora really is, and what other columns he writes. Hmm..

so perhaps you can leave a comment next time you visit Mr.Rajpal, nice to see you in the LK blogsphere.

Ciao
Deane.

We, the silent majority

Getting actively involved with the Sri Lankan Blogsphere and if I may call it, the entire Websphere has been truly an eye-opener.

The pure and filthy Racism is not only hurtful but just horribly disgusting to even read. It seems the racists have sprung up everywhere most notably in comments on blogs, mailing lists, and news sites. A prime example is comments posted at Lankanewspapers.com a site which offers regular news updates from Sri Lanka. The comments for each of these news articles almost always end up in a war of words between Sinhalese extremists and Tamil extremists.

It’s interesting to analyze where exactly this blatant racism is coming from, usually the majority of Sri Lankans (please excuse Mr.Wimal Weerawansa) are rather laid-back creatures. Perhaps the apparent anonymity of the web gives them a sense of security to voice out what they really feel without worrying about the possible consequences. Either way the situation is very depressing, not only because there seems to be so much of racists but more so for the fact that there seems to be almost no response from the middle minded moderates of this country.

"All that is necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing."
(Edmund Burke)

So I think it’s time we the silent majority take some action, perhaps maintain a racist list in a separate Blog dedicated to Anti-Racism in Sri Lanka or maybe something as simple as a ‘I hate Racists’ button on blogs with a zero tolerance for Racism. Any ideas are welcome.

Cheers,
Deane J AKA ~CC~