Don’t tell us to stop noticing when religious people are shitty. Tell religious people to stop being shitty.

I wouldn’t lump all the people of a religion into the same boat if that religion didn’t have a death grip on the levers of power due to its congregants willingness to spill blood for those ends over the past two millennia.

As an institution, Christianity has relied on the passive support as well as the active participation of the majority of its congregants to dominate Western civilization through violence. Their current position of power is built on countless mass graves, slavery, genocide, and every form of bigotry imaginable being upheld and promoted by its followers for centuries. It’s only in the last few decades that there has been any kind of push for change, and it’s been less than incremental. We can’t even elect a woman as president of the US, much less a queer person or even an open atheist. This is because the majority of religious people will not accept it.

You may be a good person, but you are the anomaly in the grand scheme of your religion. You are the outlier. A violent biker gang doesn’t cease to be a violent biker gang just because a few of its members hand out stuffed animals to kids once a year. That’s called PR, and I’m not falling for it.

Reform your institution top-down. Kick out the power hungry. Kick out the depraved leaders who fuck little kids and cover it up. Kick out the grotesquely wealthy who prey on the poor to buy a new jet. Make them the outliers. Until you do that, your association with them is a conscious choice, and a choice of conscience.

Thank you for aligning with my morality. I appreciate that you believe I should exist and have rights (probably, hopefully). There are people in the cults that try to adapt it to their conflicting views of reality.

One of the foundational problems is of foundational world view, and it terrifies me. Let me explain:

I base my morality on a series of questions built upon each other. Some starting points are: “is killing wrong?”, followed by many successive questions, such as looking for exceptions. This much is basic philosophy, but gets complicated quickly.

You and I differ by that I base my morality on this life, and this life alone, without religion. I do not believe there is a sky daddy, I do not believe there are gods of the sea, I do not believe mountains are gods and such, as there is negative evidence for those things - I do not follow faith like that, and do not follow a cult book of rules and made up punishments.

However, you do. And I know that many other people do, too. They follow of various strengths, and unpredictable and inconsistent ways. Different religions, different denominations, different churches, different stages of their lives… Whatever. It’s all somewhat the same amount to me.

Now, the problem with that is that your morality (and as I try to predict and communicate with others, too) is based upon your view of the world -> which is defined by those imaginary rules, societies, heiarchies, with leaders and laws and taboos and secret societies and and stuff (a cult). It’s difficult to leave and structured fundamentally to control and expand to dominate. Not all, I realize that. But, like most good things about religion, those are the exceptions to the rule, and volatile at best.

So, where when I place my limits on when it’s bad or acceptable to kill or what is good and bad, it is from reality…

Yours is too, but with added rules. Occasionally, you have built in rules like “it’s good to help people because afterlife”. But you view afterlife as important, so important that it overrides otherwise mutual social contracts, such as letting queer people be happy being queer, or other such things that religion peaches against.

I do not have those rules, you do.

We play by different rules.

Fundamental world view rules.

Mine are based in reality. I honestly have no idea what the fuck yours are based in, because regardless of what religion you are, people pick and choose and make stuff up all the time.

That is the difference between you and I.

And also why neither of us are ignorant, but also why I lump religious people together: because you all follow in varying amounts the varying made up imaginary rules based on imaginary made up groups and made up books. I don’t know you, I don’t know how far you will go, I don’t know what your morality truly is, nor your true code of ethics. I fundamentally cannot trust you, because faith is so personal, and because religious people are all literally in cults, gravitating as followers in various amounts.

It’s terrifying and I’ll put up with you. I mean you no ill will, but I also know that you’re inherently dangerous and two faced and manipulative and liars and the dominant force around the world right now, and overwhelmingly in history.

The rules I follow are based around when one dies, that’s the end. So all of my morality and ethics are based around the experiences we have here and trying to make it a better place for everybody, nothing more or less.

Can you honestly say the same? Or do you believe in things that matter to you but not me, that I do not believe exist, that you will fight for, make decisions upon, try to change in others, follow your cult advice, and ultimately fear?

What does your faith mean to you? What would you be like without it? How would your life be different? What would you be like if you believed in a different human religion?

I am not bound by these specific human tethers. I am bound by others, but not religion. I question the others as much as I can, but the more I find out, the more rotten I find things really are. From ordered, predictable, repeating chaos, but still rotten. Rotten, because I know things could be better, yet are getting worse for reasons we all know some of, and few of us continue to drill down on because along with some growth, can also be torment.

Live your life. Do what you think is best. Everybody is that way, and nothing I say will change that. All I ask is that you go with peace and good will, and try to find a way to accept my hopefully very well justified distrust of religion, and my immense dislike of it which stems from direct pain and suffering caused by it and the members of it and the horrifying twisting of what it does to the minds of them. I wish you well, but I also wish those who you affect, well, myself included. We are, after all, all in this together.