RELIGION OF POLITICS

Re: “Any pure believers?” (PostBag, Nov 9).

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, spirituality, and 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 and many other overtly political ideologies.

In fact, Prime Minister Prayut Chano-cha adheres to the ideology of Thai Buddhism every bit as much as Xi Jinping follows his officially established communist ideology. The Thai prime minister practices the teachings of the local ideology, which preaches, for example, that it’s okay to kill, or to order paid servants to kill animals and even humans with the proper dispensation, to lie your heart out about plotting a coup, to censor the peaceful expression of honest opinion and research to prevent correct 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 cavort in over-the-top embroidery in the gaudy palaces of Rome well-stocked with young alter boys and Swiss guards to keep out nosy investigators who threaten to bring the teachings of Christ into their gilded halls of conservative tradition backed by despotic rule of law and rigorously entrenched social norms.

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 is 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