Stoning People In Brunei

/ Sirius Bizinus

Brunei recently legalized public stoning for gay sex and adultery. According to The Guardian*, the shift to more religious-inspired law has been planned since 2013. For those who don’t know what stoning is, it involves throwing rocks at someone until that person dies from it. While Brunei is a predominantly Muslim country, stoning is not limited to the religion of Islam. Stoning was pretty popular in Jewish law, and it featured prominently in texts which made it into the biblical Old Testament.

Image author: Zamonin. Published under a CC BY-SA 3.0 license.
Image courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.


Regardless, if you’re LGBT, you’ll probably want to avoid Brunei in the short future.
Although, to be fair, not many people go through life wanting to go there. It’s also difficult to find on a map. In fact, people think about it so little that the above image isn’t even a picture of Brunei. That’s actually a picture of the island of Rhodes, in the Mediterranean Sea.

Here’s where Brunei really is:

Image from Pinterest.


As you can see, Brunei is nowhere near Europe. It’s in the southern Pacific Ocean. The country borders Indonesia. What’s important is that if you think you’re headed there, it might be dangerous. I don’t even know what else they can throw rocks at you for.

From what I understand, it’s just the decision of the sultan.
This is important. While I’m sure some Muslims in Brunei are happy about this, I know some Christian people who look at these developments with envy. In other words, if they were sultans of their own countries, they’d try to kill LGBT people and adulterers too. This isn’t about one particular religion. It’s about how the delusions and hatred of someone can culminate in the sanctioned killing of innocent people.

Clearly we have a long way to go in securing a peaceful, happy life for all people. No place is perfect, and everyone has their struggles. But let’s hope that one day we can at least stop killing each other for terrible reasons.

*On another note, at the end of the article, the Guardian noted that the sultan’s brother is a source of embarrassment for him. He stole money, lives a hedonistic lifestyle, and christened his personal yacht Tits. Part of me is thinking that the sultan’s doing this because he really, really hates his brother.

4 thoughts on “Stoning People In Brunei”

    • If I had more time to write this article, I would have gone into that a little more. One of the reasons I don’t do many posts like this is that I’ll invariably get person from faith Y saying “Yeah, faith X is totally the wrong one!” What escapes them is that both faiths are wrong, for the exact same reason. Nobody deserves a prize for being less of a terrible person.

      Liked by 1 person

      • Well said. And you’re absolutely right. While religion can numb men to an inhospitable and inconsistent world, religious boundaries have proven monstrously efficient mechanisms separating the pure and virtuous ‘us’ from the impure and evil ‘them’, and in the appropriate setting that is all the rationale a sufficiently motivated man needs to perform, or order, unthinkable violence.

        Liked by 1 person

Comments are closed.