How does society affect my conscience?
How does one form his or her own religious beliefs?
I always thought that it is only matter of what you keep hearing from friends, parents and people around you. e.g. it becomes easier and simpler for a child growing in India to believe in Hindu deities and accept one of them as its own God of worship. Or it aligns for a common European or an Australian naturally to grow believing in what pope says or what Christianity teaches.
But it may not be that simple for a minority to keep their faiths and beliefs intact. Not because they might face criticism or discrimination — most of the countries are liberal enough to allow one to follow any faith or religion these days. I am talking about your own conscience that believes in certain philosophy. It becomes hard to keep that faith within your own conscience because you soon start comparing your beliefs with the prominent one around you and start questioning who is right.
And generally the hammering principle used in advertisements applies here too. One starts to think that what he hears most often is often true or better.
This is most of the times a reason of frustration or depression or eventually conversion. The next generations of minorities who grow in other countries often turn to extreme measures to pretend to keep their beliefs alive or they liberally drop those beliefs to form a mixture with the prominent one. This is a long term process that continues over several generations.
No doubt, both of these options cause some amount of frustration… the only way to tackle this is to understand that the beliefs that you had formed originally were not of your own in the first place but mere influence of the prominent one around you of those times. So if you are doing the same thing with the new philosophy now, it does not have to cause conflicts in your mind. The new one you are accepting or questioning are also following same principle of being prominent around you.
Change is inevitable and so will happen with your philosophy. Those who merge the new thoughts with the existing ones find peace of mind much easily.
