source<\/a><\/p>\nKUANTAN: The state government will adopt a more liberal approach to matters concerning religion and places of worship. State secretary Datuk Muhammad Safian Ismail said they planned to improve the system and administration processes pertaining to applications related to places of worship.\u00a0 “In the past, there were some glitches and we intend to improve the system and administration processes.<\/p>\n
“The committee on places of worship for non-Muslims which I chair will meet more regularly,” he said during a dialogue with several representatives of the Kuantan Chinese Methodist Church members here.\u00a0 Also present was MCA legal bureau chairman Datuk Ti Lian Ker, who brought up several related matters to Muhammad Safian.<\/p>\n
Ti said in the past, the issue on places of worship was deemed “sensitive” and could not be debated in the open. “Now, the time has changed and this misconception should be corrected as under Article 5 of the Federal Constitution, all citizens are guaranteed the freedom to religion.<\/p>\n
“What we are doing is to discuss our rights to renovate, expand and build places of worship and what actually went wrong,” he said.<\/p>\n
Citing an example, he said a church group had applied to the local authority in Cameron Highlands for years to build a church but was not given an approval.\u00a0 He said in other instances, certain conditions were imposed by the authorities before approval was granted. “These problems due to many factors such as individuals, administrative obstacles and delays should not have happened.<\/p>\n
“We are glad that Muhammad Safian had given an undertaking to review the present approach and to give approval if all guidelines were adhered,” he said.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Pastor Lau Seng Lye said he was glad that the state government would be more open and accommodating on issues involving places of worship. He said their church in Jalan Gambut could only take in 300 worshippers and would like to expand their premises. Earlier, the church had submitted an application to expand their building but was rejected by the local council.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
What caught my eye was the word ‘liberal”.\u00a0The article\u00a0implies things were not so rosy before this in Pahang.\u00a0On one side we have applications being rejected, and on the other hand we read the “committee on places of worship” will meet more regularly (not to reject more application i guess). So if anything goes wrong now, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6,10],"tags":[112,113,302,275],"class_list":["post-1676","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-borninmalaysia","category-religion","tag-discrimination","tag-intolerance","tag-religion","tag-temples"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/poobalan.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1676","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/poobalan.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/poobalan.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/poobalan.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/poobalan.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1676"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/poobalan.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1676\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/poobalan.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1676"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/poobalan.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1676"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/poobalan.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1676"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}