The divide

Mai said, crying:

• I'm sorry, my parents are very firm: if you won't convert to our religion, they won't let me marry you. As a girl, I can't defy them and follow you regardless. And you, for your own reasons, can't abandon your ancestors' religion and take mine. Perhaps that is all our fate allowed. I wish you will find someone better than me, hic hic...
  Đạt held Mai's hand, not knowing what to say. After a while Đạt said:
• What if you go back and negotiate again? I'll follow your religion while keeping mine, and follow both.
• You talk as if you're joking. A religion is one religion only.
• I think every religion is good, they all teach people to be kind and live well.
• But if you study the doctrines deeply they are very different. The elders will not let you follow two religions at once.
• Nowadays some people even have two nationalities. Following two religions would be fun, what's wrong with that?
• You're so funny. Religion as if it were a joke, following two at once. Next you'll say you can marry two wives at once, and I'd be dead.
  Đạt burst out laughing:
• One wife only, but two religions is fine, nobody forbids it, no law forbids it. The Constitution allows freedom to follow a religion and to follow none. Following a religion means you may follow any number of them.
• The Constitution doesn't forbid it, but if my parents don't agree, it's as good as forbidden. What matters is whether my parents agree, never mind the Constitution.
• How hard. So from now on, when you love someone, you have to ask which religion they are first and only then love them.
  Mai rapped Đạt on the head:
• You make it sound as if loving is easy.
• Or I have another idea: I pretend to follow your religion, and after the wedding I go back to mine.
• Oh my goodness, you're planning to deceive the divine too...
  Đạt scratched his head in frustration:
• Why is this so hard 💔

Every religion teaches people to love one another, except people of other religions. Strange, I don't know why.
Most religious teachings instruct people to be kind and live well and to revere the divine above. The divine is very high, higher even than the idea of a nation, and this is exactly the point of contradiction. In real life, the nation is the highest: it is the common living environment of all its people, bound together by history, law, society, economy, politics and all sorts of interests. But in religious belief, the nation is nothing at all, and no one mentions its importance. Only people with ethics and wisdom see how the nation embraces the human condition and so love their own country, even while keeping their religious belief.

The nation is an entity that embraces all other subjects and binds people very strongly, more strongly than the international community. International ties are only agreements, while ties within a nation are compulsory. So a nation badly needs the unity of all classes, all components, all religions, all ethnic groups and all people in order to create the strength to build and defend the homeland. But that ideal of national unity is undermined in secret by religious notions. It is a fact that once people believe in a religion, they take love of country lightly. This is so because religion continually feeds into believers' minds notions of the divine above, too high, higher even than the nation. It is only a belief, but it has the power to rob people of their patriotism.

Only those with wisdom who look back at reality and see clearly that the nation is their living environment, their object of love, their protection and shelter, will know how to rebalance religious belief and patriotism. Religious belief must give way to love of country so that everyone in the country can be united. Every religion must love the country. Every religion's followers are children of the country. Everyone is a citizen of the nation. Everyone has a duty to be united in love of the nation. Let no sentiment divide the nation. A genuine religion must urge all its believers to love their country in order to practise citizens' ethics, because a citizen who does not love the country has no ethics. If a religion makes citizens without ethics, that religion is at fault. A religion has the duty to teach its believers to love their country. If believers do not yet know how to love their country, it is the religion's fault. Every religion lies within the country.

Because of religion let us love one another, and let us not be divided from one another because of religion.