I also read Lee Pusan's letter 'Secularists, too, should be more open-minded' (July 31) with great interest. I salute her for speaking up the truth and against the majority opinion in the non-Muslim society.

In recent years, the images of violence, intolerance, extremism and terrorism have been associated in the minds of secularists with only followers of religions. As a secular liberal, I think it is unfair.

In fact, there have always been secularists who are more violent, intolerant, extreme and terrorist-like than those who believe in the Divinity.

For example, the extreme secularist and atheist Khmer Rouge killed two million or 25 percent of the Cambodian population between 1975 and 1979 in order to achieve its secular utopia.

In the former Soviet Union, intolerant secularists like Stalin and his secular Communist Party of the Soviet Union (CPSU) starved to death millions of peasants. So did another well-known secular ideologue Mao Zedong in China. The secular Shah of Iran, too, used his oppressive state apparatus, especially the secret police Savak to kill and torture followers of Islam.

In the Western world, one of the classic examples of secular extremism is Hitler and his secularly mad gang, the NSDAP or Nazi party. Going back further into European history, Maximilien Robespierre who tried to replace Christianity with the worship of secular 'Reason' popularised the guillotine and used it to murder thousands of French, especially the Catholics. Read Charles Dicken's A Tale of Two Cities or Victor Hugo's Les Misrables , and we would be more knowledgeable about the hatred and intolerance of the secular minds.

Nowadays in Malaysia, many self-styled secularists like to occupy the moral high-ground in their polemics not only against PAS but also the Catholic Church and other religions.

But, my challenge to them is simple: How much do they know about the ugly history of secularism which they are so fond of citing? I put it to them that they are either ignorant about the real meaning of secularism, or they are actually practising a religion that is just not called religion.

I do not want everybody to agree with me 100 percent. What I want Malaysians to do is to engage in some balanced thinking and to be self-critical, and not only always critical of others. Secularists or atheists who hide behind the cloak of secularism must not think their belief system is universal or immutable. May God/Allah bless us all.