Mike Meyer
Nov 1 · 2 min read

Obviously I agree with you in principle. Diversity is our greatest strength and that includes traditional values and alternative economics as well. As I have written, we need a new spiritual diversity that is fully removed from bigoty, racism, and scientific antagonism but that appears to be impossible with the traditional religionists.

The reason that the surviving part of the political spectrum has pronounced religion extinct is that it is becoming so. The numbers that I see are about 20–25% of the population with another 40–50% referencing family history but not involved and the growing group who rejects it as irrelevant and distasteful.

These people who are still involved as religionists are one of the minorities that that should be protected. I think they are best thought of as an ethnic minority as they are often that also.

The problem that I see is the failure of the Christian religionists to understand their role as a minority. Minorities are concerned with protecting their status as full citizens while maintaining their specific cultural traditions. Religion is a cultural tradition. Such a minority does not get to dictate cultural traditions to others. Being able to maintain your own beliefs, costumes, festivals and traditions is something we all have to protect at the planetary level.

In every case that I can think of the problems arise from the presumption of privilege to force cultural traditions on others. There is and can be no such privilege.

This seems so obvious to me as part of Hawaii’s culture in the Pacific. I’ll admit that. When everyone is a minority, assumptions of privilege are weak. If you realize that you are a minority you will have a different attitude toward all the other groups it is possible to identify as a minority. That attitude is the critical difference.

On a very practical level, people who try to live here either make that attitude change or they will be gone in one year. We all know that. It’s almost a law of nature.

That is the attitude that needs to be made the standard. It doesn’t solve everything but it changes the way the world looks and works.

    Mike Meyer

    Written by

    Educator, CIO, retired entrepreneur, grandfather with occasional fits of humor in the midst of disaster. . .

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