When I’m criticizing religion, one of the things I often hear is that if every religion were like Buddhism we’d have no problems. This is absurd to anybody who has had their thumb to the pulse of global politics in the last decade. While I can certainly admit that on the whole Buddhism causes fewer problems than Christianity or Islam, it’s not without its dark sport. The most recent are proposed laws in largely Buddhist Myanmar that would require governmental permission to change one’s religion and would curtail interfaith marriages:

Draft laws in Myanmar aimed at protecting the country’s majority Buddhist identity by regulating religious conversions and marriages between people of different faiths have “no place in the 21st century” and should be withdrawn, a U.S. government agency said on Wednesday.

These laws are pointed directly at Muslims, who are the second largest religious group in the country at about 5% of the population. They are likely a result of recent violence in the country that is the result of tension between the two factions:

At least 237 people have been killed and more than 140,000 displaced by the violence since June 2012. The vast majority of victims have been Muslims, who make up about 5 percent of Myanmar’s population of 60 million.

This is why government must remain secular: so the majority religion cannot use the government as an enforcement arm for their faith. This would be obvious to every Christian in America if they were actually the minority and didn’t have to rely on empathy to imagine what that would be like.