Salt * Wet * Fish

Today’s letter on the ST Forum really takes ignorance to the highest level. In “God has a place in public morals debate” a Ms Chan tries to melt all religions including Buddhism and Hinduism into the same Godly religion. Don’t ask me, but this is the highest form of ignorance one can possess.

God is the author of morality in human history. In other words, moral standards and moral values originate from God, in monotheism the Supreme Being and in polytheism, the Supreme Beings, who transcend human beings.

Be it Confucianism which is strictly a value system, Taoism, Buddhism, Islam, Christianity, Judaism or Hinduism, et cetera, all religious faiths that believe in an absolute Supreme Being or absolute Supreme Beings share the common values about sex, family life and procreation, and are against homosexual sex.

There are many other common values shared by different religious faiths.

Any reasonable person would not be that quick to judge all religions equally and all belief system to be the same. Anyway, I sent this up to the ST Forum, hope it gets printed:

I refer to Ms Esther Chan Nek Fa letter’s, God has a place in public morals debate (ST 26 May), in which she tries to combine all religions into a single belief system.

I am saddened by the fact that certain right-leaning religious groups are trying to influence and assert their morality on the public debate. I am more saddened by a similar ploy to assert their views onto other religions. This shows how little understanding and how much ignorance one has when trying to make such assertion.

As a Buddhist, I must state that Buddhists does not belief in and has no need to belief in a creator or authoritarian God, because salvation is through our own efforts alone. In fact, the “creator God” in the Buddhist cosmology is relegated to the same situations as humans, animals and hell beings. That is, the “creator God” have a life span and will cycle through rebirth and death just the rest of us, albeit over a much more longer time span.

Also Ms Chan claimed that all religions have share common values about sex, family life and procreation. Catholics feels that contraception and divorce is a sin, but not the Protestants. Islamic law allow one man to have up to 4 wives, but I don’t think any mainstream Christian church holds the same position. Buddhist does not insists on procreation or marriage and sees marriage as a social contract instead of a religious duty. Just this few examples shows the diversity of values between various religious and even within the Abrahamic religions. How could Ms Chan have claimed otherwise in the age of Google? I just cannot imagine where she got her information from.

As to Ms Chan claim that all religions are against homosexual acts, I beg to differ. I appears that so far only a single school of thought have been trying to influence public opinions with their religious views and only one school of thought that have come out violently and angrily against homosexuality, especially those affiliated with the right-winged fundamentalist religious movements in the US like Focus on the Family.

As for Buddhists, there may be differing opinions, however, most of those are attributed to cultural influences instead of religious believes. Moreover well-known monks like Dr. Sri Ven. Dhammananda and Ajahn Brahmavamso have said that homosexuality within Buddhism should be treated equally just like heterosexuality.

Even the Dalai Lama in his latest book called “Dalai Lama, the Authorized Biography”, in the chapter on “Sex, Sexuality, Homosexuality, and Celibacy” said:

“HH 14th Dalai Lama said (recall from memory, not direct quotation) that unlike some other religions, buddhist monks observe celibacy not because sex is sinful but rather due to sex may be hindrance to spiritual development such as attachment to the lover.

On gay sex, he said this is just another way of seeking pleasure and seeking pleasure is human nature and human nature cannot be sinful if no harm is done to others.

He also said that it is not up to him to comment on other people (the context here is gay people) seeking different form of sexual pleasure.”

I think this is going out a bit too far, which books have she been reading? What friends does she have? Which church did she go to (obviously she is not Muslim, Hindu, Taoist nor Buddhist)?