Religious cults are enemies of nation building and economic progress

The rise of cults like GISB or Global Ikhwan Sendirian Berhad and Holdings threatens planning for a prosperous and dignified Malaysia. — Bernama

The Madani budget has been tabled and it aims for development and progress hopefully will turn our lives around for the better.

The rise of cults like GISB or Global Ikhwan Sendirian Berhad and Holdings, which is believed to be a splinter of the Al-Arqam cult that was declared a deviant group, threatens our planning for a prosperous and dignified Malaysia.

Knowledge progress

One key aspect of human and nation development is the progress in knowledge. In order for knowledge to grow, thrive and be of use, it must developed in a critical and rigorously academic and practiced manner.

Information, experience and perceptions of societies must be framed within a critical discourse and questions formulated to break down the issues and rigorously examined to develop newer and better ways of doing things or thinking about things. With the presence of cult teachings, knowledge is inward and imprisoned and all interpretations will depend entirely on a group of self appointed people that would imprison the human minds to stagnate and eventually die. Billions of ringgit allocated for education and research would be wasted and the nation will never change and progress positively.

Prof Mohd Tajuddin opines that religious cults will undermine progress of the nation — dividing the community and stagnating progress with the rejection of discourse and critical thinking.

Secular education

An important part of education is profession-based knowledge and philosophical or social based knowledge. Both must come from a secular perspective with critical discourse and empirical findings being the basic tools for humanity to teach itself differently from the past.

Cults like GISB would stagnate and kill secular education as it is deemed unrelated to the world view of God and other religious teachings.

The budget had allocated almost RM90bil for schools and universities to make sure that the country has the work skills and the professional knowledge that would attract investors as well as provide a multi-national collaboration on many business and educational ventures.

Cult teachings abhor secular knowledge, which is deemed detrimental to the survival of the faith that deals with the idea of faith knowledge from the elders, with no chance for testing, examining and discourse.

Education religion

The budget also saw much money being allocated for religious teaching especially that of Islam. The Madani government seek a modern style education of the tahfizs, madrasah and Islamic education institutions in order to provide a perspective of both the worldly and spiritual development as one and growing at the same pace. Cults like the GISBH uses direct faith teaching that has gone far away from the teachings of the Prophet Muhammad. They rely only on their cult leader’s Abuya or Ashhaari’s visons and statements to guide their spiritual paths.

The cult believes in the continuity of the dead leader’s teachings through human vessels and even vassals in order to grasp a strong hold on the minds and soul of the followers. They will not be able to appreciate the real teaching of Islam from a platform that is more moderate and critical in approach.

Global work culture

A global work culture is no longer an “if” but is now a “must”. Work appointments now cross cultural boundaries and a global education construct that looks at the world is encouraged, and peering inwards at one’s own micro society is no longer an option. Universities must see that their curriculum accreditation aligns with the broader requirements of a borderless world. The idea of an education for a career destined mainly in a small geographical location is no longer an attractive or the only option.

A narrow-minded educational construct is no different than a cult holding back its followers under a coconut shell that would have apparent short term safety at the cost of larger and more golden opportunities.

Freedom and entrepreneurship

Freedom of expression and questioning leads to entrepreneurship where the talents and ideas matter most. The days of a fixed and boxed in ideas of cults like GISBH or even of professions in any practice are challenged with the rise of AI doing jobs that earlier graduates can perform.

The new ways are the management and the ideas of new ventures and cross cultural competition at the global levels are now the new gaming fields. The old borders should be no more. And yet, Malaysia is still stifled with old outdated practices and evaluations of a fast disappearing and extinct work constructs and policies. To be successful, new ideas must challenge the old ideas and practices with the ocean that has no shorelines to be the new battlefields of economies.

Democracy and dignity

In human history, religion was supposed to define the dignity of a person.

But then, religion became a tool of conquest and subjugation and has made man less than what he was meant to be by creating a class of clergy and followers.

It was democracy, socialism and communism that began to redefine the dignity of the person through ideas of economy, whether of a shared state or a capitalistic one.

The worth of a person is related to the idea of property ownership and currency exchange in one sense and also the ideas of human rights and civil liberties on the other. In a cult where the leadership owns and profits everything while treating workers as slaves without personal wealth, the dignity of a person decreases significantly as well as the idea of expansion and innovation. Without personal wealth and capital, new ventures would fail to materailise.

Democracy as practiced now in many nations is an anchor of economic well being where justice for basic survivability and dignity of people are controlled by the masses rather than like a cult from the leadership alone. Political and religious cults destroys human dignity and thus the economies that go with them.

Conclusion

Religious cults will undermine our progress as a country and as a nation. They divide our community and stagnate our progress with the rejection of discourse and critical thinking. Without discourses and critical thoughts, entrepreneurship and progress die out along with whatever survivability or sustainability that we can ever hope for.

Prof Dr Mohd Tajuddin Mohd Rasdi is a professor of Architecture at the Tan Sri Omar Centre for Science, Technology and Innovation Policy Studies at UCSI University. He also sits on the Board of Governors of Universiti Kebangsaan Malaysia (UKM).

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What’s in the RM421bil 2025 budget

 What’s in the RM421bil 2025 budget

  Budget 2025: Singles, senior citizens to get RM600 Prime Minister Anwar Ibrahim tabled the 2025 budget, of which RM335 billion, or 79.6%, .

Have they, not just politicians, civil servants no shame?

 With billions being spent on Budget 2025, it is important that the money reaches the people, and is not siphoned off by the corrupt and kept in ‘safe houses’. Good must triumph.

Dorairaj Nadason

‘Give us what you stole from us’

 

Indigenous senator yells at King Charles as his Australia trip causes a stir

0:15 / 0:29

'You are not my king,' Australian senator yells at King Charles

An Indigenous senator told King Charles III that Australia is not his land as the British royal visited Australia’s parliament, while Prime Minister Anthony Albanese said the monarch is no longer needed as the country’s head of state.

Sen Lidia Thorpe was escorted out of a parliamentary reception for the royal couple yesterday after shouting that British colonisers have taken Indigenous land and bones.

“You committed genocide against our people,” she shouted.

“Give us what you stole from us – our bones, our skulls, our babies, our people. You destroyed our land. Give us a treaty. We want a treaty.”

No treaty was ever struck between between British colonisers and Australia’s Indigenous peoples.

Charles spoke quietly with Albanese while security officials

stopped Thorpe from approaching.

“This is not your land. You are not my king,” Thorpe yelled as she was ushered from the hall. Thorpe

is renowned for high-profile protest action. When she was affirmed as a senator in 2022, she wasn’t allowed to describe the then-monarch as “the colonising Her Majesty

Queen Elizabeth II”. She briefly blocked a police float in Sydney’s Gay and Lesbian Mardi Gras last year by lying on the street in front of it. Last year, she was also banned for life from a Melbourne strip club after video emerged of her abusing male patrons.

Albanese, who wants the country to become a republic with an Australian head of state, also told the king it was time for his role to end. “You have shown great respect for Australians, even during times when we have debated the future of our own constitutional arrangements and the nature of our relationship with the Crown,” Albanese said. But, he said, “nothing stands still”.

Australia’s six state government leaders underscored the political divide on the country’s constitutional relationship with Britain by declining invitations to attend the reception. All six would prefer an Australian citizen was Australia’s head of state. They each said they had more pressing engagements yesterday, but monarchists agreed the royals had been snubbed.

Meanwhile, Charles joked about past encounters with Australia’s formidable wildlife – brown snakes, leeches, funnel web spiders and bull ants during his time at a rural grammar school called Timbertop when he was 17.

He did not mention being sneezed on by a nine-year-old suit-wearing alpaca named Hephner.

Greeting supporters at the Australian War Memorial, Charles stopped to admire a sartorially suave alpaca that was wearing a gold crown and suit. He reached out to “Hephner”, as the woolly camelid is known, and gave him a quick rub on the nose.

However, that caused Hephner to sneeze all over the king and his bodyguard who was also in the line of fire. — Agencies

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Web design WOES, function needs come before form, beautiful and fancylooking

 
In the era of ai-enhanced design, experts caution that businesses often prioritise beauty over functionality, resulting in stunning websites that don’t drive sales.

Why Your Pretty New Homepage Is Probably a Waste of ...

Why Your Pretty New Homepage Is Probably a Waste of Money 

A pair of web design experts with decades of experience between them explain why most homepage redesigns fail miserably, especially now. 

Say you’re searching the web one day and you come across a truly beautiful website. The image is striking, the copy inspirational, the design meticulous. You could frame the thing and hang it above your couch. Are you likely to click and buy whatever that page is selling? 

Not according to veteran designer and author Michal Malewicz, who has been designing websites for companies large and small for more than 20 years. 

Thanks to an explosion of image generators and other fancy new tools, the web has recently become chock-full of extremely pretty websites that do a terrible job of actually selling anything, he argued on Medium recently. 

He and other experts insist that it’s the latest AI-fueled version of a problem as old as the web — business owners wasting tremendous amounts of money on ineffective but beautiful websites. And any entrepreneur who actually wants to make money should be warned.  :42 

Wasting money on fancy homepages is an internet tradition

Bad homepages are, of course, nothing new. Elena Verna, a startup veteran who worked in growth roles at companies like SurveyMonkey and Dropbox for 15 years before becoming an entrepreneur herself, has written about this problem in her newsletter, Elena’s Growth Scoop.

Over the course of her career, she has seen more than her fair share of failed homepage redesigns. “What usually happens?” writes Verna. “A multi-month effort ensues, involving everyone and their mother’s opinions, and the result often doesn’t fail to lift sign-ups — it can crash them.” 

The problem, she explains, is two-fold. One, many potential customers make up their mind about a purchase long before they go Googling homepages, meaning the expense and effort of these huge redesign projects often fails to move any meaningful needle. 

But also, when companies redesign their website they generally want to make them more beautiful and fancy-looking. Verna’s word for this is “aspirational,” and she claims it rarely works out. Nice-looking words and images usually just end up confusing those looking to make a purchase. 

Across the many, many redesigns Verna has encountered, “I’ve never seen one that had a major positive impact,” she says. 

Why the problem is worse now 

All of which is a long-winded way to confirm that businesses have been wasting money on bad homepage designs basically since there were homepages to design. But according to Malewicz’s detailed Medium post, the problem is more acute these days for two reasons: technology and design trends. 

Like Verna, he too has observed that business owners have long fallen into the trap of prioritizing good looks over results. 

“When making websites for clients, we may think they want to get as many sales as possible. After 25 years of doing that, I can assure you it’s mostly not the case,” he writes. “Regular people treat design as close to art. They want a pretty painting on their domain most of the time.”

The job of the designer is, in part, to talk them out of “just pretty” in favor of effective and pretty. But recently, many designers have been seduced by a new rage for artistic, inspirational, and animated homepages and forgotten this basic truth. 

“Currently we see a trend of pretty images merged with mediocre UI exploding on social media,” cautions Malewicz. 

He signals out a few particular examples for constructive criticism in his post. If you’re actively thinking about revamping your website, I’d recommend you take time to read his whole analysis. But the bottom line for business owners is a simple warning. 

Devoting a lot of time and money to creating a more eye-catching website has always been seductive — it seems like such a straightforward way to grow your business. And it’s even more seductive with all the fancy new tools designers have to play with at the moment. 

But if you care about results more than artistic merit, it’s also almost sure to disappoint. Pretty is nice, but function needs to come before form. 

SAY you’re searching the Web one day and you come across a truly beautiful website. The image is striking, the copy inspirational, the design meticulous. You could frame the thing and hang it above your couch. Are you likely to click and buy whatever that page is selling?

Not according to veteran designer and author Michal Malewicz, who has been designing websites for companies large and small for more than 20 years.

Thanks to an explosion of image generators and other fancy new tools, the Web has recently become chock-full of extremely pretty websites that do a terrible job of actually selling anything, he argued on Medium recently.

He and other experts insist that it’s the latest Ai-fuelled version of a problem as old as the Web – business owners wasting tremendous amounts of money on ineffective but beautiful websites. And any entrepreneur who actually wants to make money should be warned.

The tradition of fancy homepages

Bad homepages are, of course, nothing new. Elena Verna, a startup veteran who worked in growth roles at companies like Surveymonkey and Dropbox for 15 years before becoming an entrepreneur herself, has written about this problem in her newsletter, Elena’s Growth Scoop.

Over the course of her career, she has seen more than her fair share of failed homepage redesigns. “What usually happens?” writes Verna. “A multi-month effort ensues, involving everyone and their mother’s opinions, and the result often doesn’t fail to lift sign-ups – it can crash them.”

The problem, she explains, is two-fold. One, many potential customers make up their minds about a purchase long before they go Googling homepages, meaning the expense and effort of these huge redesign projects often fails to move any meaningful needle.

But also, when companies redesign their websites, they generally want to make them more beautiful and fancylooking. Verna’s word for this is “aspirational”, and she claims it rarely works out. Nice-looking words and images usually just end up confusing those looking to make a purchase.

Across the many, many redesigns Verna has encountered, “I’ve never seen one that had a major positive impact,” she says.

Why the problem is worse now

All of which is a long-winded way to confirm that businesses have been wasting money on bad homepage designs basically since there were homepages to design. But according to Malewicz’s detailed Medium post, the problem is more acute these days for two reasons: technology and design trends.

Like Verna, he too has observed that business owners have long fallen into the trap of prioritising good looks over results.

“When making websites for clients, we may think they want to get as many sales as possible. After 25 years of doing that, I can assure you it’s mostly not the case,” he writes. “Regular people treat design as close to art. They want a pretty painting on their domain most of the time.”

The job of the designer is, in part, to talk them out of “just pretty” in favour of effective and pretty. But recently, many designers have been seduced by a new rage for artistic, inspirational, and animated homepages and forgotten this basic truth.

“Currently we see a trend of pretty images merged with mediocre UI exploding on social media,” cautions Malewicz.

He signals out a few particular examples for constructive criticism in his post. But the bottom line for business owners is a simple warning.

Devoting a lot of time and money to creating a more eye-catching website has always been seductive – it seems like such a straightforward way to grow your business. And it’s even more seductive with all the fancy new tools designers have to play with at the moment.

But if you care about results more than artistic merit, it’s also almost sure to disappoint. Pretty is nice, but function needs to come before form. – Inc./tribune News Service

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