Tag Archives: beliefs

From faith or with faith?

This isn’t meant to be a critique of any specific religion, and it’s not a criticism of having faith in your beliefs. It’s a simple question: What should religions really teach us?

All religions have benevolent followers who act out of kindness and love. Support for family and community is a driving force for them.

All religions have unkind and unlikeable followers who act out of selfishness and self-indulgence. A lack of care for others well-being is inherently in their goals and aspirations.

Many people have benefited from a church or religious community supporting them. A sense of greater belonging strengthening their identity with like-minded people.

Many people have suffered in religious wars, crusades, and attacks from foreign people with foreign beliefs. A sense of alienation, a world of slavery, forced conversion, or death follows the invasion.

Do we need religion to act kind and benevolent? Could we be loving, caring and community-minded without a holy scripture? Could we be good people without faith in an organized religion, without a scripture to point the way?

Does goodness come from following a faith, or does a faith promote the goodness already inherent within us?

We can coexist with people of different faiths being loving and kind to one another. We can see the good in others who approach their faith with benevolence, even if their faith is not the same as ours. And if a faith prevents this, is that a benevolent God to follow? Can we seek peace beyond our faith, with those from outside our faith?

Do we learn to be good from our faith, or do we need to better understand how to be good to everyone beyond those that share our beliefs, as well as those that do? For it seems to me that in this day and age, if one’s faith does not promote openness and love beyond that faith, the faithful need to question how much good that faith brings them?

A global community

One love, one heart 
Let’s get together and feel all right. ~ Bob Marley

I used to think that we would reach a time in my lifetime where we could all be seen first and foremost as citizens of the world. That people would eventually be able to get a global passport and travel with a universal identity as global citizens. It was naive, but I thought it would happen.

With the rise of social media, I thought we were getting closer. I saw how social media extended the reach of individuals to find others of similar minds and interests. The internet extended our reach and our ability to understand others, whether they thought like us or not.

But while understanding our differences can help us see that we really are more alike than we think, differences in core values separate us further. Religions divide us more than anything else. That’s ironic and sad. Faith in a higher being sectionalizes humanity into narrow groupings that undermine our ability to focus on the well-being of our global community.

What would it take to go beyond the divisiveness of religious dogmatism?

What would help us see that as a species we have more to gain from being cooperative rather than confrontational?

What could bring us all together as a global community of citizens that care for our species and our world?

I fear that people will try with tyranny before they try with love.