“We need to strive to be more accepting of POC” you guys can’t even handle religion.
White people, when it comes to religion you have to come to the realization that a lot of non-white cultures have a strong connection to religion. Religion isn’t just the thing that your parents used to be homophobic towards you. There’s millions of religions in the world and religion plays a big part in other cultures.
Also, Christianity and Catholicism aren’t the only religions in the world. Just grouping all of religions around the world and just watering it down to these two is not constructive.
Also, if you were raised Christian or Muslim, or raised not particularly religious in a culturally Christian or culturally Muslim society (aka most societies in the world), your perception of religion and what it means to be “religious” is vastly different from the framework that most peoples and civilizations have used for most of history. Christianity and Islam are both universal religions which view religion as a purely faith-based spiritual belief and practice which you either do or don’t follow, and if you do, that’s good, and if you don’t, that’s bad. In both traditions, religion is something that can and should be spread and can be easily mapped onto other cultural and national identities. That’s the whole reason why Christianity and Islam are the two largest religions in the world and global forces of imperialism and geopolitical power, because they divorce faith from other aspects of culture in order to gain as many followers as possible.
But for ethnic groups who have held onto their spiritual and theological practices despite Christian and Muslim colonization, religion isn’t something you “have” or “don’t have.” It’s a part of your culture which can’t be separated from other, “non-religious” aspects. Whether you believe in all of your culture’s spiritual and theological beliefs is up to you, but they are there and they are part of the culture and part of your daily and ritual practices and interactions with others in your community.
For groups like Jews, Hindus, Parsis, Yazidis, Sikhs, Druze, Samaritans, and practitioners of folk religions indigenous to Africa, the Americas, and Oceania, our religion, however we feel about it, whether we believe in it or not, regardless of any complicated relationship we may have to it, is part of our ethnic and cultural identity. When you reject our religion, you reject us and our people.
amhrancas 