re: "Iran steps up activist, journalist arrests in protest crackdown" (BP, September 27, 2022)
Dear editor,
The current suppression being practiced by Iran's morality police and sacred law exemplifies perfectly the eternal joy of faith-based ideology. Religions such as Islam, Christianity, Hinduism and so on are at heart exactly like hardline communism and fascism in their lust to impose their false beliefs and unholy moral values on all, rigorously suppressing heretics and dissidents.
History amply demonstrates that religion is decent and actually moral only when held in check by law founded on the superior moral values of secular humanism, most notably in liberal democracies. Otherwise, it behaves very like a communist, fascist or other thuggish authoritarian intent on "saving the children" or "protecting women's virtue" or "saving society from abomination X" or "saving the nation from invading infidels/foreigners" or some such populist lie that appeals to the unquestioning faithful intimidated by draconian punishment into silence in the face of blatant evil committed in the name of the god, the party founder, or their revered sacred texts and dogmas handed down from unquestionably infallible ancestors.
Christianity, for example, is historically only recently better behaved in liberal democracies precisely because it is there held to account to the higher moral standards freed from religion. It is not so long ago that Christians were imprisoning scientists who spoke truths about reality, burning witches and faggots, and waging war against competing sects. Still today, it is Christian leaders even in the US, Australia, and elsewhere who lead the charge against same-sex marriage, against women's right to actually determine the uses to which their own bodies are put, and against books deemed blasphemous. The topical instance of religion unchecked by just law are the faith-driven Islamic leaders of Iran, ruthlessly enforcing the divine dictates of their very own god of "peace and love": they are every bit as peaceful and loving as China's communist party or Putin's Russia or Myanmar's thugs waging their sacred missions, for whom no sacrifice of actual humans is too much.
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 October 1, 2022, under the title "No time for religion" at https://www.bangkokpost.com/opinion/postbag/2404678/wishful-thinking
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