YourValentine wrote:
I also think that believers are convinced that God is the origin of everything that happens but that is true for many religions, not only Catholics.
Of course. I'd be saying the same thing for any natural disaster in any part of the world where the majority of the people subscribed to a single faith. It's simply food for thought.
>I just think it's not a good time for non-believers to start a discussion about spiritual superiority.
It's not about superiority. It's about alternatives, and using one's mind to its potential. In the spirit of mutual understanding and growth as a people, is choosing a faith that our ancestors had forced upon them the best choice a 21st-century mind can make?
>In fact, I do not think that my Italian friends, who are ALL Catholics, need to improve spiritually. They do not push their faith into my face and I do not question their religion. It's a matter of mutual respect.
What kind of world would we live in if nobody challenged their fellow beings to grow? Avoiding discussion under the guise of mutual respect is exactly why I used the word "taboo" in my first post. Asking someone to even talk about their faith is still considered a taboo by most people, and I think it's a horrible loss for the human race that they feel the need to hide behind it instead of rationally discussing it with others and why it works for them, while learning about why someone else's view of the world works for them as well. It rarely happens, because 99 times out 100, "because I believe it" is where the discussion stops. In most cases, being an adherent of a major religion is not a rational choice, which is why the discussion rarely goes anywhere, as opposed to some alternative worldviews that can be rationalized.
Therefore it's not mutual respect. We'd have mutual respect if Christians, Jews, Muslims, Bahais, and Buddhists all knew plenty about each other's histories and current issues within each. Until then, it's mutual silence, and mutual avoiding discussion to aim for a better understanding of each other. Absence of dialogue between the faiths has led to some of history's biggest conflicts and hundreds of millions of deaths, but the absence of dialogue on this entirely different level is a less visible but arguably equally major problem that most of us don't recognize yet.
