Existential Psychology

Trying to Convert People to Your Faith

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Do you really think that a God of infinite love and wisdom would be so petty and cruel as to deny entrance to the kingdom of heaven based on a person having different religious views? The absurdity of this idea strikes us as a sign of arrested intellectual and emotional development.

If we must entertain the notion of a metaphysical realm, then the God who rules over this realm either embodies infinite love, justice, and wisdom, in which case efforts at conversion are pointless since all who live by values of love and justice will be welcome, or this God embodies cruelty and pettiness, in which case aligning yourself with this entity is aligning yourself with cruelty and pettiness, not values worth cherishing or passing on.

The narcissistic attitude is the culprit for the schisms that make people from the various religions think of each other as tarnished and damned. This attitude is unable to widen its field of vision beyond its own subjective interpretations of the world. It’s unable to empathize since it can only see the world from its own perspective, so it projects this perspective onto everyone else.

It’s really quite simple. If God is love then all who live a life of love are Godlike. The superficial differences amongst the various religions, the differences that separate us from one another and have caused so much suffering in the world, obscure the fact that all the religions teach the same basic values, values that many people in their fervor seem to forget or ignore. These religions are like different rivers all flowing into the same ocean, or like different trees all inhabiting the same forest.

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