Religion, Belief and the Responsibility We Have Towards Each Other

Throughout my life, I have met people with different beliefs, different religions, different ways of understanding spirituality and completely different ways of looking at life. I have met people with very strong faith, people with no religious faith whatsoever, people who question everything and people who seem completely certain about what they believe.

Lately, and particularly since creating TFC and becoming more open about who I am spiritually, I have also experienced something else.

I have received aggressive words, attitudes and behaviours from people who believe that because I do not belong to a particular religion, I should not occupy certain spaces. I have been made to feel that some conversations, communities or subjects somehow belong exclusively to people who practise a particular faith.

I have even been called a witch.

And not in the nice sense of the word.

If you are going to call me a witch, at least call me one nicely.

I can actually find something rather beautiful in the word when I think about it differently. Think about cooking. Unless you follow every recipe precisely, you probably use your instincts. You smell your food. You taste it. You touch it. You add a little more of something because somehow you know it needs it. You make herbal tea. You grow plants. You create something for somebody you love.

There is something beautiful about human beings using their senses, knowledge, instincts and relationship with nature to create.

But I am not writing today to teach you about witchcraft. Nor am I claiming that cooking dinner makes somebody a practitioner of witchcraft. I am talking about the labels we place on other human beings and, more importantly, the intention behind those labels.

When somebody uses a word to diminish another person, the real question is not necessarily what that word means.

The question is: Why did you need to diminish them in the first place?

I Do Not Fit Into Your Mould — And Neither Should You

I don't fit neatly into a religious or non-religious mould, and honestly, I don't believe that I should and neither should you. The only mould you should ultimately be trying to fit is your own. Even our children don't remain inside our moulds. They grow up watching us, listening to us and learning from our behaviours, but they become individuals. They develop their own thoughts, experiences, relationships, questions and understanding of the world.

So why would we expect another adult, raised somewhere else, living another life, carrying completely different experiences, to arrive at the same beliefs that we have?

You may believe in God or in a particular religion. Some are like me and believe in the afterlife, other are spiritual but not religious, just like me. You may be an atheist. I have met a few in my lifetime. Science: you may even be one of those amazing people that I have met who believe that science is the best framework in which to understand human existence. And so on….

Why should any of those answers automatically make one human being more valuable than another?

This is where my problem begins: not with religion, but with superiority.

What Does Your Belief Produce in You?

If your faith teaches you love, dignity, humility, compassion and forgiveness, what happens to those values when somebody tells you:

I don't believe what you believe.

Do they disappear?

Can you still respect that person?

Can you listen to them?

Can you allow them to disagree with you without trying to convert, embarrass or diminish them?

Can you leave a conversation knowing that neither of you changed your mind and still shake hands?

And these questions are not exclusively for religious people.

If you are an atheist and you laugh at somebody because they pray, the question belongs to you too.

If you consider yourself spiritual and dismiss somebody else because they are supposedly not on your "level", the question belongs to you.

If you use science as a way of declaring everybody who thinks differently from you intellectually inferior, the question belongs to you.

And yes, if you believe in spirits, manifestation, prayer, meditation or life after death and use those beliefs to position yourself above somebody else, the question belongs to you too.

This isn't me against you.

This is us examining ourselves.

Why Do You Need Me to Agree With You?

This is something I find much more interesting.

Why are we sometimes so desperate for other people to understand us?

Why do you need me to approve of your beliefs?

Why do I need you to approve of mine?

Why do we sometimes need everybody around us to know who we are, what we know, what qualifications we have, what we believe and why we are right?

What approval are we searching for?

And what happens inside us when somebody refuses to give it?

If somebody saying, "I don't believe what you believe," makes you immediately angry, defensive or cruel, perhaps there is another conversation to have.

Not with them.

With yourself.

What am I defending?

What am I afraid of losing?

Why does another person's belief threaten mine?

Why do I need to make that person smaller for me to feel secure?

And perhaps one of the most uncomfortable questions of all:

If I need to diminish you to feel secure in what I believe, how secure am I in my belief?

Faith Can Mean Many Things to Different People

People hold onto faith for different reasons. For some, it is love, family, tradition, and/or the sense of community.

For others, faith has carried them through grief, fear, illness, loneliness, uncertainty or moments when they genuinely did not know how they were going to continue.

Some people are frightened of death.

Some carry guilt or shame.

Some grew up inside a religion and have never imagined life outside it.

Others grew up religious and eventually left.

Some grew up with no religion and later found faith.

And some people study religion deeply and still conclude that they do not believe in God at all. Deep study does not require conversion. Neither does disagreement require contempt. You can read religious texts, study philosophy, theology, history and different religious traditions and eventually say, I still don't believe. You can undertake the same exploration and say, Now I believe more deeply than I ever did before.

The conclusion belongs to you.

What concerns me much more is what you do with that conclusion when you encounter another human being.

Your Positive Words Mean Very Little Without Your Behaviour

I have been writing recently about manifestation, spirituality, spirits, life after death and the practices I personally use. I believe positive words can be useful. I also believe that prayer can be useful. I believe meditation can be useful. But there is something we cannot ignore. You can wake up every morning and say beautiful affirmations. You can pray, meditate, speak about love, speak about God. You can talk about kindness, healing, positive energy and manifestation.

But who are you when somebody irritates you?

Who are you when somebody disagrees with you?

Who are you when the person standing in front of you has nothing you want?

Who are you when nobody is watching?

Who are you when somebody cannot give you status, money, opportunity or approval?

Who are you when you meet somebody whose entire understanding of life contradicts yours?

That person is also you.

Spirituality cannot exist only in the words we say when everything is peaceful.

Our values have to survive contact with other human beings.

My Human Diploma

I have academic qualifications, but there is another type of education that matters enormously to me.

I sometimes think of it as my human diploma.

It isn't hanging on a wall, actually. It came through living. Through studying: law, neuroscience, spirituality. Through my experiences with the spiritual world. Through being wrong and changing my mind. Through listening and through pain. Through happiness and through meeting people whose lives look nothing like mine. Through learning that another person's dignity cannot depend upon whether I understand or approve of their choices.

All of those experiences have taught me that becoming a better human being requires considerably more than collecting information.

Knowledge without humility can become another instrument of superiority.

Faith without humility can do the same. So can spirituality, education, and professional status. The question is what we do with what we know.

Sit at the Table

Perhaps this entire article can be reduced to something incredibly ordinary.

Sit at the table with somebody who is different from you. Maybe they believe in a God you don't believe in, or maybe they don't believe in God at all. Maybe their understanding of spirituality makes absolutely no sense to you. Let them cook for you. Receive the meal they prepared with love. Eat, talk, listen. You don't have to change them, and you don't have to prove anything; there is no need to turn the table into a battlefield. You may get up from that table believing exactly what you believed when you sat down. So might they.

And something beautiful can still have happened between you.

You treated one another as human beings.

This Is the Community I Want to Build

This is ultimately why I am writing about religion.

It isn't to create another separation. It is to create more togetherness. As the TFC community continues to grow, I want something to remain very clear:

You are welcome as you are. You are welcome with your faith or without one. You are welcome with questions, and you are welcome while changing your mind. You are welcome with your spirituality, even if spirituality has absolutely no place in your life. It is possible that you don't have to understand my communication with the spiritual world. What I ask from this community is something much more fundamental.

Respect.

Dignity.

Responsibility.

Humility.

Kindness.

Curiosity.

And the willingness to examine ourselves before pointing towards everybody else.

Because we can spend our entire lives complaining about our neighbour, our family, society, religion, politics, communities and everything that everybody else should be doing differently.

But eventually we have to come home to ourselves.

Because we do not change the neighbour next door without changing ourselves.

So whatever you believe, believe it.

Whatever you are still questioning, question it.

Continue learning.

Continue studying.

Continue growing.

And when you meet somebody who sees this enormous, complicated world completely differently from you, perhaps you don't need to convince them of anything.

Perhaps you can simply pull out a chair.

Sit down.

Share the meal.

And let both of you keep your dignity.