Casual Cruelty

Ideas are beautiful things.  They can lift us out of the mundane.  They can inspire us.  Ideas can comfort us.  Ideas can also be dangerous things, when they coalesce into ideologies that leave no room for compassion.

I was fortunate to attend the play, "The Book of Mormon" last week. Extremely funny show.  Seriously for an adult audience, as there is significant profanity and irreverence.  But the play has an important message inside the comedy.

We all believe in things that stretch credibility for those not raised within our belief tradition.  And often, our beliefs are exclusive, not inclusive.

I was raised Roman Catholic, and still practice my faith traditions.  When I was a child growing up, I was taught that anyone not baptized Catholic could not go to heaven.  I never even questioned that until I was in my teens, then it started to bother me.  Why would a loving God do that?

The first answers I got were that it was not my place to question God.  I accepted that for a while, then realized I wasn't questioning God, I was questioning human's interpretation of God.

Many people fully embrace their faith traditions, and I'm fine with that.  The casual cruelty happens when a person believes and vocalizes that only people sharing their faith tradition can have eternal salvation, eternal life or be right with God.

If you think about it for a minute, that kind of vocalization in public is casually cruel.

I'm fine with evangelizing to someone who asks for it.  I'm even OK with asking people if they would like to learn more about your personal faith tradition.

What I'm not OK with is people in a audience that they have no knowledge of professing to have the one answer, the one path to salvation.

And unfortunately, most organized religions espouse and support the belief that there is only one path, only one correct tradition.  And that is casually cruel.

The underlying principle of most organized religions is love.   Yet the human manifestation of most organized religion is divisive, and exclusionary.  And is comfortable telling people that they will suffer eternal damnation because they were born into the "wrong" faith tradition.

None of us know who has it right.  We all believe what we believe.  We are working in the area of faith, not science.  Each of us can find out we were wrong about what it takes to achieve eternal salvation.

So, isn't it more important to be good now?  To treat people kindly?  To try to bring hope and light and comfort?  For most of us, belief in an afterlife is a great comfort as we imagine being reunited with loved ones who no longer share this plane of existence.  Who is anyone to tell anyone else that that comfort is denied to them because they believe a different set of incredible stories?

It is always too easy to believe you are right, and others are not.  But when it comes to matters of faith, we just don't know.

So isn't it better to leave the other rules alone and stick with the one rule that organized religion and ethical atheism have in common, treat others as you would like to be treated?

There are so many divisive things in this world, it is truly sad that religion, which is supposed to comfort and unite should be one of the biggest dividers.

I will cling to my faith traditions, because they work for me.  I hope yours work for you.

And I hope there is a Supreme Being, Life Force, Presence, who thinks we are all a little silly for our dogmatic devotion to things we believe.

And who just cares about what we do, and how we treat each other and our planet, and not so much about the rituals and rules we have created to try to explain the mystical in the universe.