Why You’re Told to Hate 50% of People

Writer’s note: We’ll to get back to a more actionable style of newsletter next week! This topic has been mulling around in my mind as I work towards solidifying a set of intrinsic personal values to live by as I move towards building a meaningful life and family.

Many wars in history have been fought in the name of religious ideologies.

Antiquity, the Crusades, the Israel-Palestine conflict, all examples of religious wars.

In recent years, wars of traditional religion have given way to wars of a different kind of religion. The battlefields look much different than the ones you learned about in history class.

Today’s wars are fought from the comfort of a couch, on the internet, and the weapons are words, not guns.

These new religious wars are fought by people who would never self-identify as religious.

These are the people who would tell you that they’re “spiritual but not religious.” But, if you take a closer look, you’ll see that they have all the trappings of a traditional religion.

They have their own set of beliefs, rituals, way of dress, their own system of ethics, rules, their own governing bodies and their own schools.

The only thing that these new secular religions lack is a belief in a higher power.

And, even that’s not really true…

Many of these new secular religions do believe in a higher power, just that the higher power is themselves, their cultural leaders or their political leaders.

They are the ones who are of the highest moral authority, and that we would find utopia if we only enacted their vision of the world.

As the popularity of traditional religions has waned and been replaced by new religions, the world has become a more divided and polarized place. Thanks in no small part, to the algorithms of social media companies.

Previously, in the Judeo-Christian worldview — the basis of western civilization — there was a belief that God was the father of all mankind, we are all equals and that we are to love our neighbour as ourselves.

We’ve replaced this belief with one of oppressors and oppressed. We’ve moved from a multiple-sum game to a zero-sum game.

We believe the lie, that everyone who is not a part of our group must be the enemy.

In actuality, there is a broad spectrum of human experience. There are good and bad people in every group. But, we’ve become so tribal that we often choose the easy route of laying assessments on entire groups of people rather than a sovereign individual.

It’s easier to view the world in black and white instead of shades of grey.

So while traditional religions are not without their flaws, they gave us a foundational set of morals that endured over time.

Here’s Your Action Item:

Let’s use this as our reminder to be better at passing judgement on individuals and not entire groups of people. Let’s be empathetic to everyone and not just the people who believe like us or vote like us. You never know the lived experience of another person. The person you are judging might even know something you don’t.

My intrinsic value: I believe that every person deserves to be judged on their own actions, not on the actions of their group members.