People are often surprised that religious devotees lack decency in dealing with other human beings. Personal commitment to a religion demands denial of spontaneity, reason and curiosity, rejection of empathy, playfulness and kindness, the very features that make us human. How do you expect such a person to treat a stranger as a human being when he already denied the essential humanity to himself and often sadly to own children? Surely you can’t expect from a man what he doesn’t even allow himself.
Indeed human nature is difficult to contain. But as long as the restrained humanity is the ultimate lofty aspiration, it must still come with ease towards the strangers. Even at the moments of personal weakness when religious people fail to act inhumanly towards themselves, they gather the inner strength of being unyielding and uncompromisingly mean to others.
Occasionally the indoctrination sinks in. Talking to God is like standing in a control room, how it could possibly compare to relating to a mere mortal? Connectedness and emotions are the unfortunate chores. As a rule the higher is religiously the more pronounced is the social hostility. When a religious person speaks to strangers they treat them like children or animals. They raise their voice and grimace like people do with children; they project with assured tone and delusional superior aplomb, the imagined possession of a secret code. While most people cherish and invest time in their social groups, most religious people function within family clans and show hostility and indifference to human imagination, creativity, genius and suffering of the strangers.
Photo by Dan Zollmann – Stads Landschap (City Landscape) via flickr/Canvas_TV
Further Reading:
Speak Like a Human Being
Redemption in Disappointments
How do I measure up to Joseph Stalin?
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{ 1 comment… read it below or add one }
What definition are you using for “religious person”? Is it just a matter of the length of his peyot/beard/tsitsit?