I was rather surprised yesterday when a friend of mine posted a news clip about the controversial usage of the word ‘Allah’ for Christians’ translation of God in which several churches have been attacked by some extreme Moslems (here). In Indonesia, Christians have been using the word ‘Allah’ for centuries even many people before Islam rose in Arab, Christian Arabs had been using the word ‘Allah’ for centuries and some pagan Arabs had used the word for ‘moon god’. I could see that this issue is mostly stirred by political reasons like what I have experienced in Indonesia several years back – but the dispute did not go this far like in Malaysia.

What puzzles me the most is the fact that in this digital era where many of us have access to internet, why people do not clarify the issue? I had a small discussion with my father about a theologian who tried to convince people about 6-days creation using the argument of the authentic text of Genesis. In the acttual text, the author used the word ‘YOM’ to explain the time of creation which is translated as ‘day’. I laughed. I am not an expert but from the internet, I could actually browse through different definitions of ‘YOM’ which is basically ‘not only day but can also mean unlimited (long) time’. Fair enough, that we might argue that not everything on internet can be trusted but at least a quick 5 minutes browse on internet would help to broaden the knowledge. I do this, not only before writing this text, but also to prepare my knowledge before engaging myself in public or just a simple talk at work (esp. with iPhone and Blackberry are internet friendly now). Well it can be any public figure, politicians, or just a simple person like us. Sometimes I would like to ask one question to these people who feel that they are absolute genius (fair enough if they are a proper genius with proper knowledge). The question is:

‘HAVE YOU ASKED MR. GOOGLE and MRS. WIKI?’