The Birch for Temple Monsters | Letters to the Editor

What were these monsters thinking when they entered a Hindu temple and desecrated it by cooking corned beef (of all things) inside?

I am a follower of the Christian faith and one of our instructions is to give Caesar what is Caesar’s.

And I consider that to mean obeying all secular laws of the country in which you reside.

And one of the laws of our country is that every citizen has the right to choose his cult/religion.

Since our independence, we have inadvertently touted and demonstrated to the rest of the world our tolerance (one of our watchwords) for diverse religious beliefs.

Without getting carried away with emotional feelings, let me cut to the chase and suggest here that there should be a reward for anyone who can expose the culprits of this disgusting act.

Because they did this disgusting act, not just against the Hindu community, they did it to all of us.

This act can only be interpreted as sowing the seeds of discrimination and religious prejudice.

We just need to look around and take note of the obvious and endless global miseries that religious division continues to unleash.

I have always defended the “return” of the executioner.

I say “return” because although a specific sentence for murder is still in our written laws, even with the hundreds of murders increasing each year, the executioner seems to have been sleeping for more than two decades.

So here I am now pleading for the return of another once appropriate but now seemingly lost punishment for certain crimes…the birch.

It should be reinstated given the many reports of sexual and other physical abuse against women. And bearing in mind that if court arbiters declare “hard labor” on those convicted of certain offences, what exactly does that “hard labor” entail?

Over time, we can use the birch for other physical crimes, as in this last case, the desecration of places of worship.

Why the birch for this particular crime, you ask? We must remember that one of the feelings most dear to their hearts (after the love and care of their family) is their devotion to their particular religious belief.

This should explain the hundreds or thousands of years of fighting between peoples of the same land but of different religious beliefs.

Acts of this type (desecration of temples, mosques and churches) have the potential to create not only psychosomatic division, but also physical clashes between normally good-natured citizens.

With our boastful statement “we are all one”, we don’t really want to go there, do we?

Given our rejoicing mood, coupled with our seemingly eternal political division, we can just take this “little” temple incident for granted, that is, until it slowly becomes but surely uncontrollable.

This unpleasant act can easily be called an international denunciation. We need to nip it in the bud, right now, with the appropriate punishment of course.