Curse of religion

re: "Care needed in Sajat case" (BP, Editorial, September 24, 2021)

 
Dear editor,

In the sad case of the wholesome Nur Sajat, we yet again see zealous ideologues preaching love and peace and morality hounding those cursed to live under their despotism, intolerance, and rejection of moral decency. Religion, one of the most common causes of hell on Earth these last few millennia, is merely one subset of ideology. Like its more honestly political sister ideologies such as communism, fascism and rabid nationalism, religion, as this case plainly demonstrates, demands mindless subservience to and blind faith in its extravagant claims of omnipotence allied to moral perfection. There exists no evidence or reason for those fantastic claims, hence the ruthless suppression of liberty and freedom of peaceful expression that hints at dissent from the dictated orthodoxy.

Islam is, it must nonetheless be admitted, every bit as enlightened and morally decent and founded on truth as are its sister religions that also hold the Bible to be a sacred text direct from the gods. And each member of that subset of sister religions is in turn every bit as reliable as a guide to reality and good morals as every other religion on Earth ever has been, from village shamans, to the Egyptian pantheon, to the Olympian gods, to the high religious traditions of the devout Aztecs, and to sacred Phoenician Ba'al and to every other religion still living or long dead. But that ideology-based insistence on being believed contrary to reason and evidence alike is also a textbook definition of a fake claim.

Whilst respecting the right to religious freedom in private. Whenever religions seek power in the real world, especially political and legal power over the bodies of real, living people, perhaps it is right to be reasonable and to hold the factual and moral claims of such publicly intrusive religions to exactly the same standards applied to claims about Covid, police use of torture, and the sums of the squares of the sides of right-angled triangles. Is there any sound reason not to be so reasonable?

 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 September 25, 2021, under the title "Curse of religion" at https://www.bangkokpost.com/opinion/postbag/2187435/vaccinations-for-all