Profiting on faith

re: "Keeping the faith" (BP, August 22, 2022) 

Dear editor,

Absent any supporting statistics, let us take it on faith as reported that "Large numbers of Thais are turning to superstition to help make sense of an increasingly fraught and unstable world." But is that really an excuse for business to cash in by pandering to wild claims of dubious merit? Do the marketing guru's of Krungthai's KTC and others in the lucrative Buddha amulet, magical talisman and like businesses see themselves as good Buddhists, or good people, as they peddle crude superstitions to the gullible for profit? What would the Buddha prefer: profiting from fake claims that give a cheap, momentary, false image of success, or promoting education that leads to right understanding,?

And what, exactly, is to be made of the bold claim by Kritchakhun Pornthananunt, general manager for the corporate marketing department of The Mall Group, that "we are creating faith campaigns aimed at building up luck for our shoppers''? I would love to see the statistics measuring the changes in customers' luck before and after those amazing campaigns, or has it already been infallibly proved by sacred incantation, or perhaps one of those cited "occult rites, known as mutelu", that luck for participating customers correlates so strongly with the company's profit margin that no further research is required for perfectly faith-based belief that it must indeed be as claimed?

Have any of these people lately read the Buddha's insightful Kalama Sutta (กาลามสูตร)? 

 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 August 27, 2022, under the title "Profiting on faith" at https://www.bangkokpost.com/opinion/postbag/2378156/profiting-on-faith