Mandatory religion

I was reading The Economist on a plane last night and among their usual glut of great stories, one in particular stood out to me. This apparently isn't a new story, but it was the first I'd heard of Lina Joy, a Malaysian woman who has been trying to convert her official religion to Christianity from Islam.

There is a lot to be discouraged about here, and others have weighed in on this with more informed perspective than I can, but beyond the ruling itself, what boggled my mind about this is the requirement of including one's religion on one's state identification card. Below excerpt is from the Economist article, emphasis is mine:

"In many places, constitutional guarantees of liberty are undermined by laws constraining religious belief. Indonesians, for example, are also obliged to state their religion on their identity cards and to choose between just six officially recognised faiths."

Due to both the daily grind of earning a living and the modern diversions we have at our disposal in the US, it is too easy to forget that so many people in the world today live under such astonishingly ass backwards policies. Good reporting from the likes of The Economist help make the otherwise distant and abstract feel more real.