My One Question About Your Religious Beliefs

It’s Probably Not What You Expect

Image by the Author with ChatGPT 4

Someone recently asked me, “What’s the most important question to ask a religious person about their beliefs, and why?”

This is my answer.

Do your religious beliefs require you — explicitly or implicitly — to see someone as less than human when they are clearly human? In other words:

Do Your Religious Beliefs Require You to Other or Dehumanize?

This can look several ways. For example:

Your beliefs could require you to see my lived experience as fundamentally invalid.

Seeing my lived experience as fundamentally invalid is something very different than your simply having different preferences than me. You may be attracted to or fascinated by different things, and process information or experiences in different ways. You also may be inspired to respond to the same prompt in different ways or come to unique conclusions about the same subject. We can be very different, yet welcome the learning opportunity we are to one another, and even come to celebrate how much farther we can go together because of our uniquenesses.

In contrast, if you “must” see my lived experience as fundamentally invalid, you…