ACCORDING to Andrew J White (Letters, May 25), Bolivia has drug trafficking, corruption, and poverty on a scale which is difficult to believe, yet he thinks that's a better place to be than our more affluent Scotland because the people are packing the churches. I'm really baffled, but I suppose I shouldn't be as this is yet another manifestation of the sick thinking of people like Mr White.
Yet again someone is harping back to the ''good old days'' when the Church had more influence - but the poor were more numerous and very poor. The Church did so well in the past because the ordinary folk were kept ignorant and felt obliged to follow the crowd for fear of being punished for heresy, or, in some communities, simply ostracised if they dared to voice alternative views.
Perhaps Mr White should do some research before suggesting that I should ''venture out of my little schoolhouse on the island'', since I was brought up in a tenement in Glasgow, am a regular visitor to the city (as well as many other parts of Scotland), and what I see nowadays is a far superior lifestyle for the vast majority of common, decent people than there was in the 1950s when I was growing up in a far more Church-influenced community.
It just won't wash with people that they would be better-off being poor today so that they can have a better afterlife - we don't believe it!
Frank Eadie,
The Schoolhouse,
Scarista, Isle of Harris.
May 25.
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