Dear editor,
This is in response to Shin Chul-ho's "Delusion about religion" in the Thoughts of the Times section in the May 13 issue of The Korea Times. To begin, despite the essay's title, not a single delusion about religion (or anything else) is mentioned.
Likewise, in the third paragraph the author makes a statement about "contradictions embedded in religions," although not a single one is mentioned. As for the President kneeling down "literally," is there some other way to kneel? Actually, kneeling is a very common practice in multiple religious and secular contexts.
Also in the third paragraph, the author calls himself a "nonbeliever." This must mean that he regards nothing as believable. As for his question about whether there's any universality in religion, the open-minded reader will look that up for himself or herself and find that there most certainly is (but if there wasn't it wouldn't matter).
He or she will also find there's a very broad spectrum of beliefs and stances in atheism and agnosticism. As for his question "Were any wars waged for the extension of atheism," I'd like to inform him that Hitler, Pol Pot, Stalin, Kim Jong-il, Mao Zedong and Fidel Castro were all atheists. The death toll of religious fanaticism doesn't come close.
As for the author's subsequent claim that the behavior of Christians is "not so different from that of nonbelievers" and questioning a religious acquaintance about ever having given money to the hungry, studies show that religious people are indeed more charitable than irreligious people. As for judging the Bible according to Christians' actions, this is absurd.
Judge a book by whether or not its claims are true (and no holy book makes as many claims that can be historically verified as the Bible). Finally, as for the claim that morality existed before religion existed, the earliest evidence of religious ideas dates back several hundred thousand years to the Middle and Lower Paleolithic periods; there was never a time in human history that religion didn't exist.
Bradley L. MacDonald