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Preying on the faithful
By Martin Vengadesan
LIKE many Malaysians, I am absolutely seething with anger at the actions of British paedophile Richard Huckle, who came to Malaysia and spent eight years indulging his depraved sexual fantasies on dozens of our children. Huckle was able to use both religion and his “status” as a white foreigner to gain the trust of communities eager to accept help in fighting a difficult battle against poverty. What a cruel thing to do. First of all, let me make it clear that I am not blaming the community. I do think, however, that we need to look at why he was able to gain such access to children and what concrete steps we can take to prevent this sort of thing from happening again. One thing that needs to be questioned is blind faith. Huckle used religion as an entry point, joining community work and getting close to underprivileged children in the process. That brought home something to me. Why are we quick to blindly believe in those who manipulate our own religious faith to give themselves authority? While there are many who do genuinely good work in the service of others, we must be aware of wolves in sheep’s clothing who claim to be motivated by sacrifice and benevolence but actually have an evil agenda. Growing up in the Catholic church in the 1980s, I found this was one of the greatest shames that we had to face. Over and over and over again, wherever you went – Australia, Europe, the United States – you would hear rumblings of priests abusing altar boys and lads from the seminary. You know what the first response was ... denial and disbelief. We simply couldn’t believe that “men of God” who had committed themselves to a life of celibacy could do this (and I later concluded that celibacy might be part of the problem). Next came defensiveness. We even preferred to believe that the church was being sabotaged and that these alleged victims were planted. After all, even the iconic pontiff Pope John Paul II did not seem to directly address the issue. It was only much later, early in this century, that the Vatican began to openly acknowledge this problem. And it was no small problem, as more than 3,000 abuse allegations were levelled against priests in the period from 2004 to 2014. I think the truth is that, collectively, we were blind to the dangers. We wanted to back our faith and believe good things about those claiming to act in God’s name. Our own desire to maintain the sanctity of the faith indirectly allowed the horrific abuse to continue. Incidentally, over time I came to believe that morality and religion did not have to be mutually exclusive. What was wrong with studying religions and other philosophies and drawing the best from them while removing the supernatural element, I thought? This is partly how I moved towards a sort of secular humanism in my thinking. In fact, I once removed someone from my Facebook for declaring that Malaysia’s problems were all caused by atheists. I found the sheer stupidity of that claim to be unpalatable. Surely atheists don’t even rank in the top 100 of trouble-making groups out there. I always fumed and demanded explanations for this sort of horrific abuse. Whichever god you believe in does not seem to have helped those children abused by Huckle and the millions of others in pain in the world today. Some have actually told me it could be karma. Others talk about faith in God’s plan. I just can’t believe that a supreme being would be so indifferent to this suffering. I think it’s wonderful to be guided by the virtues of religion – brotherhood, mercy, compassion, generosity. That’s wonderful. But not blind faith to the point of surrendering rational thought. Because time and time again, it’s been proven that somebody could easily come along and take advantage of that. And there is nothing in this world or the next that is worth risking the safety of our children for.
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