Read on Twitter
What does your religion lead you to do for people? Does it make you incline to compassion and empathy, or does it lead you to mistake preaching and judgmental admonition as a substitute for those things? Can you create something in the world that will actually help people live?
Harming people emotionally, spiritually, economically, sexually, what have you, is not the mark of godliness, even if you do all of these things while invoking the Divine with your tongue.
None of this is to suggest there aren’t moral boundaries (mine are firmly fixed around folks who lie, violate, and exploit others, for example). But if being “religious” leaves you and those you incessantly harangue no space for the cultivation of joy what are you doing?
Why would anybody look at you and think, “I want what they got?” Life is hard on its own, I don’t need to create more misery for myself and others around me.
Some folks will not understand the distinction here, and that is in large part because so many of us have only encountered religious frameworks that teach us how to say no, and not those that center the things that we need to figure out how to say yes to.
Put more simply, tearing down is relatively easy, but what are you prepared to build in its place?
