Religion of politics

re: "Any pure believers?" (BP, PostBag, November 9, 2019) 

Dear editor,

David James Wong misunderstands a fundamental truth about religions. They are a subset of ideologies. As such, they share the common defects of ideologies, which are at heart divorced from reality, from spirituality, and from the pursuit of good morals. Religions, like any other ideology, reject truth seeking, critical review of inherited moral precepts, and transparency exactly like communism, fascism, Stalinism, Maoism, National Socialism, and the many other overtly political ideologies.

In fact, PM Prayut Chan-O-Cha adheres to the ideology of Thai Buddhism every bit as much as Xi Jinping follows his officially established communist ideology. The Thai PM practices the teachings of the local ideology, which preaches, for example, that it's OK to kill, or to order paid servants to kill, as many animals, even humans with a proper dispensation, as desired to sate a desire for tasty flesh, to drug up on alcohol, to lie your heart out about plotting a coup, to censor the peaceful expression of honest opinion and research in order to prevent right understanding of national affairs, and so on. This all comports strictly with the ideological underpinnings of the traditional Thai state and its loyal religion.

The popes of the Roman Catholic version, among other Christian ideologies, have ever been equally in love with similarly un-Christ-like abuses as they cavorted in over-the-top embroidery in the gaudy palaces of Rome well-stocked with young alter boys and Swiss guards to keep out nosey investigators who threaten to bring in the teachings of the Christ to their gilded halls of conservative tradition backed alike by despotic rule of law and rigorously entrenched social norms against such spiritual growth. It is no accident that Galileo was condemned to prison by the popes, that various Christian sects still condemn Darwin, or that the Vatican State remains to this day a secretive sovereign state untrammelled by democratic norms.

And then there are the well known set of variations on the Islamic ideology loyally serving the secular interests of a range of entrenched political hierarchies around the world.

 Felix Qui 

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The above letter to the editor is the text as submitted by Felix Qui to the Bangkok Post.

The text as edited was published in PostBag on November 10, 2019, under the title "Religion of politics" at https://www.bangkokpost.com/opinion/postbag/1791119/locals-should-take-charge