Religion: A Multi-Ethnic Discourse

Most people advise that religion and politics are topics to be avoided over drinks; after today, I wholeheartedly disagree. I was with my two fellow Starbucks partners just waiting for the shift to be over. We had absolutely no customers for the last hour or so, which prompted us to start talking about fun things…like religion.

I was working the bar, so I made us all some drinks (by the way, as a pre-bedtime drink, I suggest a vanilla-soy vanilla rooibos tea latte). One of my coworkers is a Shi’a Muslim (male), another is an Ethiopian Orthodox Christian (female), and I am nonreligious. You’d think this would be a powder-keg, but it was the most beautiful conversation ever.

Naturally, I started out by asking if the male was a Muslim, to which he answered yes. I was curious about the female’s affiliation, so I asked her as well. They then began to ask me about my beliefs. I confessed I didn’t really have any because I felt that, even if there is God, belief tends to get in the way of gains for the whole of humanity. They asked me to elaborate, so I’m just going to give the general overview of that long speech:

• With God, many people become preoccupied with who is right, rather than trying to improve the lives of the billions of people in the world who suffer
• I am concerned with helping people, not pointing out their flaws
• People change only if they want to; not because some God told them to
• We, as humans, have the power to do both great and terrible things; God hasn’t stopped us from doing bad things, but great things have certainly been stopped in “His name”
• Religion has become overly communal when, in reality, all religions stress that a relationship with God is personal
• If religious people can’t even follow their own creeds, I think that we can’t really trust those creeds to guide us

That led to a final discussion in which we came to the conclusion that people generally want the same things…but in different places. The highly religious want the perfect afterlife and want to “save” as many people as possible. The problem with that is that, if God is as great as he says he is, the afterlife is already perfect and there is nothing we can do to improve it.

All that we can do, as humans, is to improve the livelihood of our fellow man in this life; to improve this life with the assumption that it is all we have, but with the lingering hope that there will be something better after death. I think if more people realized that, we wouldn’t be spending more on “defense” than we spend on education, humanitarian aid, green energy, trust busting, civil rights, etc. combined.

I don’t mean to attack religion—I know that there are some religious people who are amazing humanitarians. However, this does not change the legacy of modern religion. Religious practice has become a perversion of it’s core values: love, respect, compassion, charity, and peace. Maybe if religious people read their own texts and listened to the overall message, rather than just using obscure verses to justify atrocities, we could make positive gains for humankind. Until then, I’ll be having many more of these chats with many more people.