Through Different Faiths
During most of history, different religions have been the target of discrimination. The United States, countries across the world, and the UN, have even created laws and rights to protect people from religious discrimination, and we promote the freedom to express the religion we choose. Yet today, there has been a rise in Muslim discrimination, Jewish anti-semitism, Catholic criticism, and prejudgements across the globe. Four out of ten Americans have an unfavorable view of Islam. In 2014, 58.6 percent of all victims of hate crimes were Jewish. Yet none of those who discriminate religious people have taken the time to realize what it actually means to be Muslim, or Jewish, or Catholic, or even Agnostic, and understand how their religion is actually about. I interviewed four different people in Fort Collins to tell me their their religion and their perspective on it. …Are all Muslims really terrorists, and all Catholics just conservative?
LIVING AS A CATHOLIC
Caroline is a senior from the Dominican Republic, and like myself, she has grown up Catholic her entire life, went to a Catholic school, and has even been a Catholic Sunday school teacher.
“I was exposed to [the Catholic] viewpoint of the world for most of my life”, she says, but she didn’t really realize what it meant- not until later on. “At some point, as I grew older obviously, I started to question what it meant to be Catholic. For me, at that point, it was more about traditions rather than a relationship with God. I never questioned the presence of something greater than myself- the immensity of stars in the night sky, the beauty of the universe and the world, the fact that the little moments in life were just so beautiful... I felt disconnected from that in my church life.” Normally, in the Catholic religion, babies are baptized as soon as possible, but kids start truly learning about their religion once they start their first communion preparation or their confirmation, which is when they take classes that teach them about the Catholic religion and they agree to accept the responsibility of becoming a Catholic. It wasn't until the seventh grade that that Caroline understood her spirituality. She tells me, “I was on a backpacking trip, and I just felt so much love for the things around me- not just amazement or awe. That is how I think about God, this incomprehensibly endless, but still personal, love. After coming out of the wilderness with that still on my mind, I went to church with my family, and I realized that we were all united for that hour, we were following that same rituals, hearing the same readings, and experiencing the same thing that my ancestors had been doing for centuries.”
But in religion, it’s not only about determining a superior force, like God, or Allah- and being spiritual; it’s a lot about following certain traditions, which is where people tend to misinterpret certain religion’s practices. Traditions in the Catholic Church include the Mass, praying, and confessions. Caroline explains to me what Mass and prayer are like, saying, “the basis to any relationship is communication so prayer is really important. In Catholicism, our service, the Mass, is centered around a time of communion. We believe that it is the literal body and blood of Christ.” To many people, this is taken far more literal, and Caroline explains that although it may sound really weird, there is a spiritual connection to it- a transfiguration. Caroline explains it to me, saying, “Love supposedly comes from the heart, the soul of those… I guess ‘afflicted’, you could say. We believe that Christ lives and works in those who believe in Him, in their deepest self, and in his message of love. So when we say that the bread and wine becomes the body and blood, I like to think of it as a physical consummation of abstract concepts. We, the physical people, are called to share the love and sacrifice that comes with Christ's message.
The original communion took place with Jesus and his apostles at the last supper. So, when everyone is united in this one place, we celebrate Christ and choose to live as modern disciples in our lives. The last words of the Mass are ‘glorify the Lord by your life’, which I would say is the essence of one's place in Catholicism.” Other Catholic traditions include the rosary, a beaded necklace made up of sets of 10 beads. According to Caroline, “it is inspired by Mary, but one is supposed to think about the different events of Jesus' life while praying it. Because it seems relevant, I should note that we do not worship Mary, we instead venerate her, or treat her with a lot of respect.” Contrary to popular belief, women are not as downplayed in the Catholic Church as people believe, and Caroline says she is “proud that she plays such a prominent role in the church, because in many parts of the world, women are still viewed as below men. In the Catholic Church, though, we see that women do have the power to choose their own destinies and make the world a better place.”
However, sometimes these traditions aren’t understood even inside the own Church, and they are taken as something that doesn’t really give any sense to the spiritual sense of the Catholic religion. Caroline says that tradition “can be a very beautiful thing, but if a tradition becomes something where people don't understand the significance, don't understand the beauty of a relationship, or don't feel comfortable, it does not stay relevant within their lives. For me, I think that relationships (especially with God if we are talking about religion) should come before traditions.”
Depending on the Catholic church, there are different traditions to follow, and some of them may be conservative or ‘traditional’, and follow certain guidelines and choices that define your life. Caroline disagrees with some of these traditions, as she tells me that “as a Catholic, sometimes I struggle because at times I feel that the Church over-proportionately values choices over relationships.” Even so, not all Catholics strictly follow these traditions and guidelines, just as in any religion there are people that follow their traditions more strictly than others. “We all choose to live our lives a certain way”, Caroline says, “and I think that regardless of sexuality, divorce status, or other things- one should be free to love God and practice the faith in their own way. Jesus lived his life full of love, and was an incredibly amazing testament to the power of love and sacrifice within one's life. These raw and integral parts of being human are what unite us all; he was best friends with a prostitute, ate dinner with tax collectors as looked down upon as Bernie Madoff, cured lepers, and gave up his life when he did no wrong. So, after this long spiel, I guess that being a Christian-Catholic means to live each day with love, sharing that with others, and thanking the One who makes it all happen- especially when it is hard.”
Some people criticize Catholicism because of the conservative tendencies. However, people like Caroline are open to the world, and being a Catholic doesn’t mean that they oppress certain ideas that they don’t agree with. As Caroline says, we all choose to live a certain way, and that doesn’t change the way a Catholic can perceive you any differently than someone else would. As Caroline told me, “the essence of Catholicism, and Christianity as a whole, is love.” That means that Catholics, contrary to some popular belief, can love any sort of person- no matter their race, sexual orientation and life decisions. And sometimes this also means disagreeing with the Church, while still holding their faith. Today, there are controversies within the Catholic church with topics such as abortion and homosexuality. Homosexuality is not considered a sin, but it is not accepted for people to have homosexual actions, and marriage isn’t allowed- the same as it is in religions like Islam and Judaism. Caroline tells me that she considers it “not only an offense, but straight up evil, when people use the name of Christ to justify or invoke actions that are not made from love. ‘Love,’ as Mr. Rodgers from the little kid's TV show once said; ‘Isn't a perfect state of caring. It is an active noun, like struggle. To love someone is to strive to accept that person exactly the way he or she is, right here and now.’” Caroline says, “I 100% agree with this definition, and so I think that it is unacceptable to be complacent in so many issues and prejudices facing the world. I believe that the LGBTQ+ community is unfairly treated within the Church.” Today, there is more and more acceptance of homosexuals in the Catholic community. According to a 2014 Pew research, 70 percent of all Catholics think homosexuality should be accepted, but only a little more than 50 percent believe they should be able to marry. “We need to pull together, love every individual for the wonderful creation that they are, formally acknowledge that sexuality is not a choice, but rather a trait just as much as hair color or height. Once this happens, I think that tremendous steps forward will be taken to right the wrongs afflicted upon this group within the Church”, Caroline says.
The next popular issue in the Catholic Church is abortion. The Roman Catholic Church prohibits abortion, as it is considered a form of ‘murder’, because they believe that a baby has a soul from the moment it is conceived. “Straight away, the ability to make decisions for oneself is a tenant of human rights”, Caroline says. When I asked her what her stance on abortion was, she told me that she “cannot imagine being in a situation with an unwanted pregnancy, and having to change the whole rest of [her] life in account for one mistake. In countries that ban abortions, women do still seek them- making for a much deadlier and unsafer environments.” Many women try to abort a baby by using a hanger, or with cheap doctors that are not hygienic and may leave a woman terminally infertile- since 80 percent of abortions are not in hospitals, but rather in non-equipped facilities. “I think that women have the right to have access to abortion legally”, Caroline says, defending women’s rights. “Morally though, I am not a big fan. I have a lot of value for life, so I would define myself as favoring contraception over abortion any day. So, abortion is not something I would praise, but rather a last-resort to help women retain control of their bodies.” A statement which is understandable given her religion, as well as understanding that women are four times more likely to die after an abortion.
Last of all conflicts is the clash of science, education, and religion. Many people claim that Catholics believe that it is important to teach that the world was made as is stated by the Bible-made by God in only seven days, instead of through the Big Bang. However, even the current Pope, Pope Francisco, accepts evolution and the Big Bang. “The more I learn the more in awe I am of God. Like, the universe is expanding at an ever increasing rate, that is amazing! And the fact that our bodies are so complex, but are dictated by tiny strands of DNA, that's wild! So the science vs. religion debate should not really be a debate at all, because the two should not be at odds with one another, but are instead intrinsically linked. Science becomes meaningful for me with religion, and religion without science becomes baseless. So yes, the lesson is to never deny science on the basis of faith”, concludes Caroline.
Catholicism doesn’t have to be as conservative as people believe. There are Catholics, like Caroline, who believe that everyone is equal and should be equally loved, and accept sexuality and all forms of tradition. Even regarding other religions, she says that “a relationship with the divine (or whatever one considers that to be) and the love that one shares for others, are the only things that really matter in the end. The main monotheistic religions all come from the same roots, and it is important to celebrate the things that we have in common. Buddhism, Hinduism, and folk religions have a lot of value as well. When we choose to open our eyes to what others have to say, and the things that they believe deep down, we will often learn more about our own beliefs and definitely gain some insight into ourselves and those we are speaking to. If we surround ourselves only with people who think similarly to ourselves, we neither learn nor question- and that is a super lame way to live one's life.”
LIVING AS A MUSLIM
Noha, a sophomore in high school, is a Muslim. She has been a muslim her entire life, and her parents are from Egypt. They arrived in the 90s to the United States, so Noha was born an American and raised here. Her godparents in the United States are “super Christian”, and basically adopted her parents because they didn’t speak English, so she understands a lot about Christianity, too. And no, she is not a terrorist, and neither is any other muslim for that matter. In fact, as Noha explains it, Islam “is a strict religion, but it’s a rewarding one”, and it isn’t as different as people may think it is. “It’s a lot like Christianity-we have a central profit, and basically the only difference is that [Christians] have Jesus and we have Muhammed. We don’t really believe that Jesus is the son of God because we believe that gives him more God-like characters, and we believe there’s only one God. Besides that, most of the ideals and the values are the same”, Noha tells me. Even so, Muslims are perceived the least fondly than any other religion, even lower than atheists, as several 2015 Pew Research Center studies show.
But what does being muslim include? What is it like? This same Pew survey discovered that only four to nine percent of the American population actually knows what Islam is about.
So I asked Noha, and she said that there are things we do regularly identify in Islam, such as the hijab. “For women, we wear the head scarf, and it’s kind of to preserve our modesty, and cover ourselves from head to toe. You don’t have to technically, and a lot of people don’t and they’re still Muslim- it’s just a big thing in Islam for you to wear [a hijab]”, says Noha. But there are other traditions that people, myself included, don’t know about and have never heard, such as Muslim’s praying rituals. “We pray five times a day- there’s a certain time of the day where you pray each of the prayers, so the first one is at the sunrise right between sunrise and noon, the second is at noon, the third one is from noon to like, 3pm, the fourth one is between that mid-afternoon until sunset, right as sunset is happening, and then the fifth one is in the nighttime”, she tells me.
The way these prayers go is not a simple process. “We’re standing up for the first part”, explains Noha, “and we’re saying these Surahs, which are like the sections of the Quran (their holy book), and we say the opening parts of them. We say it in every single time that you bend up and down. Then you say any other Surah in the Quran of your choice, and you are supposed to memorize it. There’s this thing where if you memorize the entire Quran before you die that you go straight to heaven.” Noha continues by saying that afterwards, you “bend down only halfway, and you say this thing three times that’s basically saying ‘thank you God or bless you’, and then you bend all the way down and you say that same thing, but the shortened version of it three times twice. Then you rise again and you do that same routine like two times. Lastly, you do this thing that is like ‘thanking God’. When you’re a Muslim you say this thing that basically says ‘there’s only one God and God is Allah and Muhammed is his prophet, so that’s what the Tashahud is saying when we’re bent all the way down. After that, to end the prayer you say As-salamu 'alaykum wa rah- which is like saying goodbye to God.” Such a complex prayer means takes anywhere from five to eight minutes each time, and it is essential for all muslims- which is why they may encounter discrimination in schools and at work, where they may not be allowed to perform their prayers, even though there are laws that protect religious practitioners and promote that workplaces and schools have an area to pray in.
Other muslim traditions include the Ramada, which is where Muslims, according to Noha,
“fast from the first prayer at sunrise until the last prayer at sundown, and there’s no food or water the entire time.” She tells me it is an intended practice of thankfulness, “to give you perspective on people who don’t have food or water, and don’t have access to that. It’s a way to thank God for giving you food, water and shelter, because a lot of people don’t have that.”
Just like Caroline said Catholics have nothing against other religions, neither do muslims. Noha used to go to Bible camps to learn about Christianity, and she says “Christianity is pretty much the same as Islam”, and she really doesn’t see why people think there’s “such a huge difference between us, so big that we can’t be friends.” Noha says that nobody who is Islam hates Christians, “we don’t hate the fact that they think Jesus is God’s son, we don’t despise that fact at all, and I don’t think they hate what we believe in, either.” Both Christianity, Judaism and Islam are all related because they are all based on Abraham. She has even embraced Christianity at several times, because of her godparents, whom she says “used to give [them] Bibles all the time and [Noha] would give them the Quran; whenever [she] went to their house for dinner [she would] pray with them because Muslims don't do a prayer before eating, they just do one word, bismillah that means thanks.”
However, few people are willing to learn about Islam and embrace it just like Noha has learnt about Christianity. Instead, many muslims are discriminated, and even more so today with a rising hate towards Islam caused by fundamentalist groups, refugees, and targeting by some political groups. In the United States, Trump signed an immigration ban for seven different Middle Eastern countries that were predominantly Muslim. This is insulting and affects people like Noha, who think that the ban is ridiculous. “Why do [they] think that banning muslims will make a difference? [Extremist groups] aren’t Muslim, they just claim that they are, so banning people that are actually Muslim doesn’t help, because they don’t want to hurt you”, she says. But it’s not just the bans. Nowadays, the internet publishes quotes that misinterpret Islamic religion, too. Noha tells me, “I have seen so many things online about interpretations of the Quran saying ‘bomb these people’, and I’m like, ‘y’all… that’s not what we’re saying at all!’ Even that sentence that they show actually means something like ‘peace be upon us’…” Noha says that the extremist groups are not Muslim but that they “call themselves that but they’re not. They just say that.” Alike Noha, ninety-three percent of Muslims do not support extremist views of terrorism, as shown by a Gallup investigation. Many people, as Noha points out, also fail to realize how many muslims the extremist groups have killed equally without compassion. “They come to America and they kill someone and they say that it’s because they’re not Muslim, but then you go to the countries where the terrorist groups are most prominent, like Syria, or even in Egypt- which is a pretty modern middle eastern country and there’s people killed there, too. Nobody ever says anything about the bombings of ISIS, Al Qaeda and the Egyptian brotherhood and all those different terrorist groups have done on muslim people, they just say what they’ve done on non-muslim people because they have made themselves so prominent in that way.” Noha deliberately explains it as being on an airplane- “if there was a terrorist on a plane, they would not spare my life any more than they would spare any American people sitting next to me, even if the terrorists could tell I was a Muslim.”
Noha started asking the real questions, like “What makes a muslim terrorist that’s not really a muslim any different than a school shooter? Shooters are out to kill people too, and maybe they don’t use religion as an excuse, but what makes them different?” When we compare the twenty-four deaths caused by terrorism in the U.S. in the last decade against the more than 280,000 deaths caused by shootings, the muslim country ban seems a little bit off. “Like ISIS, they aren’t muslims, they use religion as an excuse but they aren’t actually of that religion. Nowhere in the Quran does it say that.” What are terrorist groups attacking for, then? “I just think that they’re bad people. they either want to cause chaos within the world and make Muslims and Eastern countries look bad so that America will close it’s borders and ruin America, or they just want to kill people and find an excuse for it, so that they use religion. Because, you know, there are bad people in this world that just want to kill, and they don’t have a significant reason, so they use whatever they can.”
It’s important to stop discriminating and having preconceptions about Muslims, because there are people like Noha who are really smart, nice, and understanding- and they are not terrorists in any sort of way.
For Noha, being a Muslim isn’t just wearing the hijab, (although she admits that that’s how people easily recognize her), it’s her beliefs that make her, her. “I know a lot of people think that Islamic people are super conservative, but I am not homophobic, and I have best friends who are lesbian, and I think that’s also partially due to being raised in an American society. And if people wanna have sex before marriage I don’t care- just don’t make me do that, you know, I want to stay abstinent. But really all that makes me with my beliefs, which are pretty American.” Being American has played a part in the way she sees the world, but so have her parents. They have “opened [her] eyes to more than one viewpoint”, and that includes being raised as a Muslim in a very Christian community, even with Egyptian customs. She says that some of her Libyan counterparts came in late 2000s, so they “have a lot more stricter lifelines, and you can see them walking around the school together. I’m not with them because I don’t know them super well, but you can see that they’re more disconnected, and they’re still being adjusted to America.” Coming from Egypt, going to school dressed up, missing school for Ramadan, and even in elementary school having her parents come in and show classes how to pray and different Egyptian things have impacted Noha to become the incredible person she is today- and that includes being Muslim.
BEING AN AGNOSTIC
Mark Cordo is a lawyer from Nebraska, and he characterizes himself as Agnostic. He explains Agnostic as “along the lines of ‘I don’t know’ and I know that you don’t know, and I know that nobody really knows, so I choose to not think about it, and I also oppose any efforts to force any religion of any type onto anyone. If there was strong evidence that supported anything, then I’d support it. But there is no strong evidence it’s by its nature faith, and I’m just not convinced by faith, and some people are. I am not spiritual either, I’m just very practical.” Normally an Agnostic tends to mean someone who claims neither faith or disbelief of a god because it cannot be proven.
Although Mark is agnostic, he was raised up Christian, but from an early age he was doubtful, and decided to leave religion altogether. He still thinks that religion has a lot of good aspects, and that “some of the best people of our society are religious, in the sense that they help the poor, they help people in terrible circumstances, they fight for good things.” But just the same way he sees religion as a good thing, he thinks that “it’s also a source for evil and bad things, just like anything else-obsession or undo influence, or institutions- so I think that that’s the case with every religion.” “I don’t think that any religion is inherently good or inherently bad. They all have really good and terrible aspects of them”, he concludes. For example, he says, “I feel that in respect to our society and in America, it’s so dominated by Christianity, and I feel that it’s not even the Christianity that’s even taught in the Bible, it’s a politicized version of it that emphasises only very few pieces of the Bible that people want to latch on to, they want to disregard the inconvenient parts of it that are way out of mind with our society.”
But why, and how, does religion- such as Christianity, influence politics like Mark says? First of all, there are still ties to religion in the government. The president is sworn in by a Bible, all bills say ‘in God we trust’, and the Pledge of Allegiance was modified in 1954 to have the expression ‘under God’ in it. But Mark says that sexuality and sexual things, primarily affect politics-like current news we’ve seen today of protests against the LGBTQ community, and that “religious people tend to latch on to [sexuality] and focus on it, and cite the Bible because they have ‘big pictureables’ that are more along the line of repressing them. And in particular women’s sexuality. I’ve read a lot of the Bible and I’m familiar with it, and there’s a lot more in the Bible that deals with helping the poor and giving to charity, but people that are religious tend to really, really, devalue those aspects of the Bible because it’s inconvenient for them- because at the end of the day they want to be rich. I don’t think we have a society based on true religion, we have a society that is based in a lot of ways on a warped version of christianity that isn’t even in the Bible.” However, today there is more support towards feminism in Christianity, as a Huffington Post showed, “Christian feminism is about acknowledging women’s equality before God.” It’s also true that religions are really old, and thousands of years ago when those religions were created, there was a social construct of male dominance, and women were viewed as objects. Mark says that even with social advancements in our society today regarding gender, “at the end of the day, we live in a male-power structure foundation, and that’s comforting to males and females. It’s the way it has been and people would just assume to keep it that way, and they cite these provisions of the Bible of the way it ought to be, but in reality what they emphasize is the very few provisions that talk about women and sexuality- keeping women down and in a certain place.”
But to Mark, it’s not just Christianity. With Muslims, his opinion is that “if they want to practice their own religion I definitely don’t have any problem with that, just leave me out of it. I would support, absolutely, for them to practice their religion, anybody. They are the ones that most recently are the subject of ridicule and mockery and to me, and Christianity is just as ridiculous as anything else. I don’t care what they want to practice, whether it be muslim or whatever, I don’t think that any are any less accurate than Christianity by any means. In fact, there’s a lot more Muslims than there are Christians, but, by the same token, there are people who are fanatical about Islam and I think those people are just as crazy as anyone else- it’s just the same thing.”
But recently, we’ve been seeing a rise in anti-Muslim activity since the elections. Mark says “that goes along with America, and the fact that America is primarily Christian. We have certain ideas about the relative morality of Christianity vs other religions; we view it as more honorable religion, so as a result we tend to discount bad things that are done by Christians or in the name of Christianity and attribute that crime to the individual person being bad, whereas if a crime is committed by someone who's a muslim, it’s automatically attributed to their religion.” In the United States, more than two thirds of the inmate prison population is Christian, whereas only 5 percent of inmates are Muslim. “And I think it goes back to this idea of terrorism, and it’s almost by definition that someone who’s white and Christian cannot be a terrorist under our definition of terrorism in America, where as almost by definition someone who’s a Muslim can’t be just a common criminal, they have to be a terrorist. And that has nothing to do with religion, all that has to do is with our society.” “94 percent of terrorist attacks carried out in the United States from 1980 to 2005 have been by non-Muslims”, reads a statistic found by the Huffington Post. This same research found out that only two percent of terrorists attacks in Europe in the last five years were Muslim. Mark goes on to explain what he thinks of the current terrorism caused by extremist groups in the Middle-East, “I just look at their actions and what they do, and I don’t think that Islamic extremism have anything to do with the religion itself, it has so much more to do with people’s place in the world. If we were a super poor country, and we had a very sketchy, powerful military, (and our military does a lot of shady, bad things, by the way) when our military does something shady and bad, it’s viewed with a legitimacy because it’s a government military, and there’s a lot of pride in that. But in Syria and in a lot of these poor countries in the Middle-East, these individuals don’t really have a functioning military, so if they want to argue political views in a violent way, just like we do, they don’t have a military, so they do extremist acts, and it’s characterized as terrorism, but it’s really only because they don’t have that military structure to give them that same legitimacy, even though at the end of the day, they’re committing violence just like we're committing violence, just at different levels.”
The Islamic State, since their start of terrorist attacks in 2014, has killed 2,043 people, whereas in just Syria and Iraq, the U.S. military has killed 2,463 innocent civilians since 2014. Neither of these facts make one justify the other. “People want to be heard. So when you have these poor people living in poverty, isolated, and they want to be a part of something that’s a powerful, appealing route to go. I think that route just happens to be this religious, fanatical group that does terrible things, and that sucks. that’s why I feel we’re in a very much a fork in the road in terms of as an American society and as the world. We have this whole group of people living in abject poverty and terrible conditions, and we can either accept them and bring them into our culture- which I think they would appreciate, or we can push them aside to be angry and bitter.” That’s the way it is with refugees, Mark explains. “At the end of the day, everybody is human and people have natural human desires to fit in, be accepted, and be treated equally. If you feel that this society that you’re in isn’t treating you that way, what is a human going to do? They’re going to be angry and bitter, and become influenced to go down bad routes. Refugees aren’t causing a lot of problems- is there the same amount of news attributed to normal native people that do terrible things, or when a refugee does it, is it blown up by the media? Just a couple weeks ago there was an attack in Canada in a mosque that killed six people by white Christians. That was not given as much value by the president; he didn’t even mention it, but he has mentioned repeatedly a guy with a machete at the Louvre that didn’t hurt anybody.
So you have a refugee that does that, versus the native people that do so much hate crime. What’s really the bigger problem in our society? I’m not sure that refugees are causing any more problems than the public at large. To the extent that they are, I don’t think that it’s because Islam is this inherently evil group as opposed to Christianity.” Speaking of media and it's influence on people’s perspective on religion, Mark says that “most of the media’s audience are Christians in America, so they’re inclined to believe [that Muslims are terrorists]. I think it’s also that they haven’t sat and really thought about it, you know, so I think that it’s that easy route to go and they find radical islam an attractive conflict.” “At the end of the day”, Mark says chuckling, “I’m just an Agnostic, so I think that all people who are fundamentally religious are equally crazy.”
Mark, as an Agnostic, doesn’t see one religion as something bad or evil, as other people with pretenses may come to believe. Instead, he says, being Agnostic makes him think more critically of everything. “I think maybe the other aspect of religion that isn’t really given a lot of thought about is that it makes it easy for everyone. It makes it easy in life for everyone to go and chuck it as ‘God did this, god did that’ as opposed to really examining what we’re doing. What is this person doing in their life, what is that person doing in their life, and what’s our government doing with our policies?, so I think that having this idea that there’s no real God that’s pulling the strings and that everything is a decision, has made me look at everything in a more critical way. In some ways I am more accepting. I don’t like thinking highly of somebody of one religion more than someone of another religion- on the other hand, perhaps it has made me a little less accepting, because it’s given me a little less patience with people who tell me they are religious. I kind of think that they’re not the brightest people, I kind of think ‘maybe you haven’t stopped to think about this other stuff?’ Maybe I’m a little bit more judgmental and quick to judge, and quick to make assumptions of people who are religious. If I see someone that’s fundamentally religious in any way or religion, I judge them.” To Mark, religion is something bogus, “the idea of having a God is comforting, and man created it. The Bible was created by man and it was edited. It’s an excuse for institutions to make money. The purpose of religion is to help people, and be lower than God, but that’s been lost in wealth. But I really respect religious people who aport a lot. I think that most religious people try to convince others of their ideas like abortion, and gender and sexuality, and they waste their time on that. Some people will preach on abortion but those same people will agree with death penalty, and it’s so inconsistent, where the Bible says that it would support life in any way, so I don’t think it’s fair to pick and choose the parts of the Bible that you prefer.” Overall, Mark says, religion is just as equally crazy as anything else, and he holds a special opinion on it as an agnostic.
ANONYMOUS- NON-DENOMINATIONAL CHRISTIAN
“… I am a Christian, non-denominational. Straight from the word of God and not transforming it into a religion. Not transforming it and creating our own rules, just following the gospel”, was what an anonymous man at a coffee shop told me. He grew up as a Southern Baptist, but now lives as a Christian that does not abide to any Church rules or organizations. In fact, non-denominational evangelicals have risen since 2007 by more than 1.5 percent, whether it’s because they don’t agree with any church’s ideals, or they have their own interpretations. When I asked this anonymous man about other religions, he said simply that he doesn’t “have any issues with other religions that have Christ as a forefront, but then you have religions where they worship cannabis and atheism, and I’m not such fan of those religions, but I accept them.” He explained it to me as “I am a sinner and I have a savior, but I don’t think that I’m on a pedestal over other people who haven’t figured out who their savior is.” However, when I asked him about Catholics and Muslims, his response was more negative than accepting. “I think it’s really sad for Catholics because they have to work their faith and have guidelines, and the truth is, God created the Earth and he sent out his son for our sacrifice and forgiveness- so the work has been done. iIt’s already all done and we don’t have to work for anything, and Catholics are still trying to work their way to heaven”, he said. With Muslims, like many other people, he believes that it is a violent religion. “Muslims follow the Quran, and the last chapter of their book says that anyone who is not a Muslim is an infidel, and that they deserve to die. It’s a very violent religion. So they believe that for their god, Allah, others deserve to die, and that’s not how it goes at all. That’s what they believe. It goes back to the deal with homosexuality- I’ll still love them but in my heart, I’d still love them to be in a perfect community. Because I believe in my faith, I do not believe in theirs. If a muslim would come in here right now, I’d have tea with them and listen to their story. In the Bible I follow the ten commandments, and I believe things like murder are wrong.” However, the debate upon whether Islam is a violent religion or not is something that is still up to debate, because any lines that refer to any sort of violence are contradicted and can be viewed differently depending on the time period. On the other hand, five out of the twelve Nobel Peace Prize winners have been Muslim… That figure does not portray generalized Muslims as being violent at all.
This anonymous non-denominational Christian also believes that homosexuality is a sin, contrary to what traditional Catholics believe. He says that he “hates the sin, but loves the sinner.” He also supports creationism, saying, “I believe that animals evolved in a way, but I believe in genesis creationism. God made man and he made the world.” according to Gallup, more than four in 10 Americans believe that God created the world in seven days 10,000 years ago, and that God carried on evolution as well in the creationist theory. Lastly, his stance on traditional gender roles in the household was that “God created man and created woman from man so we can have a counterpart, and I think that as men we have more responsibility to carry with us in how we lead our families and as being head of the household, but I think there’s a lot of life in for women as well. If my wife made more money than me, and she was the bread-giver, I would be totally fine with that, and I would be the one staying home with the kids.”
All around the world, there are people with different religions, and different ideals. I wish I could have interviewed somebody who was Jewish, somebody who was from a polytheistic religion, and many more people. However, different people have different stories, and religion (even the lack of it), makes up a huge part of a person’s identity. Yet today there are large misinterpretations of different religions and we are quick to judge- quick to say that a Catholic is absolutely conservative and a gold-digger, quick to assume that a Muslim is a terrorist, and far too fast in thinking that we know all the answers to a religion we don’t even practice. Sometimes, you may not agree with another person’s way of viewing the world, but that doesn’t mean you should promote violence. Instead, take a moment to listen to people like Caroline, Noha, Mark, and even somebody who may disagree with everything you support.