A Matter of faith

By Citizen Throughout history, there have been good men who did good things and bad men who did bad things. But it has taken an unquestioning acceptance of religious doctrines or preaching or a tribal affiliation to a race, to motivate good people to do bad things. History is at best a romanticised compilation of half-truths – useful only as much as we can learn from it without giving into the temptations of using history to justify our actions in the present. The only thing that can justify our actions at present is an uncompromising sense of what is right and wrong and the voice of our moral conscience which is independent of religious affiliation. As much as it is dangerous for a nation to be constitutionally bound to protect any religion, I sometimes feel that this could perhaps even be a strength in the Sri Lankan context if only we could create a legal precedence that the only way…