My Racism

Its a sad realization when one realizes they are intolerant and discriminatory. I've had to deal with this a bit more as of late, confronted by my predictable discrimination. Religion. It is a nice thing to fight about, but thats the only purpose I have seen for it, the whole world would be better off without any of it. It gets a little less humorous when one of the few people I acctually enjoy being around expresses there desire to become more religious.  This conversation started what turned out to be predictable. Her saying she was going to start wearing a Hijab, and my indication of disagreement, or displeasure maybe is the word.

The immediate response, was that it was predicted I would be the one to raise a negative response to this. Under the notion that I would not want to be seen with someone so muslim. 

That particular statement didn't sit well with me. On some level it is very true, on another it couldn't be farther from the truth. In the sense that it isn't true, I require the word 'muslim' to merely be replaced with the word religious. I find nothing particularly upsetting about Muslims but I'm not the biggest fan of Islam.  I don't care for the political infusion Islam has with the middle east.  To say a state is religious automatically brings the words oppression to the front of my mind. While its a option here, to follow views or not, the notion of the religious state seems something forced in my mind. This lies a problem with me thought, France seems like a beacon screaming to me. With a population of almost 60% that don't think god is real, I feel like a odd sort of connection. A pull towards the smallest portion of the population here that would be all around there. The irony, that seeing france as a community of atheist's shows why it isn't a community of atheists. The dominate narrative of a land no matter what it is, prevents the groupings of communities.  This to me explains why Jewish populations, Italian and Russian populations are so tight nit, because "american" is all that is, but interestingly this isn't a community that bounds together. It does in the notion of the international, but there aren't groups formed around the notion of being white that are strictly positive expressions (I hope) ((and I recognize there are the clans etc. but lets not talk about that)).

Why does religion upset me so much? Its become a priori to me, that religion is a bad thing. I acctually have trouble forming the words to come up with the arguments anymore. I'm a fanatically against as I view religion to be. I write off my anger, and justify my own behavior under the guise of its what was expected anyways. I started talking with her about it and about five minutes in she had to stop to tell me and another to stop being such pricks. Its really not ok for me to be so combative. She says essentially at one point that it is ignorant the way Dawkins and I etc. write off the religious as idiots, millions and millions of people. That they couldn't possibly have internally questioned, posited as we were doing.  This stricts me as odd looking back on it, as I see that religion can have that effect, I don't think one even has to be a idiot for something to go unquestioned to them.  If you agree with it and are always around like minded people there is no reason that it will ever be overcome. If it helps you sleep at night, if it makes the world make sense, why would you ever fight it? 

I've come to a conclusion thought, maybe the smarter religious people I know honestly feel spiritual...I don't even know what that means. I can't even comprhend what it means to feel like there is a god, to feel like the world has purpose and there is truth behind it.  Instead I take my views as baseline. Is it wrong for me to respect people less when they tell me they believe in a god? Is it bad that I burst out laughing in class when someone was talking about there views of heaven? 

I've got to learn to respect different views a lot more.