Religious Persecution v. Support

Mind you, in some nations certain religious groups are needing special protection, like, for instance, Feng Shui in China. And religious people are often persecuted for their religious belief that is different from the mainstream belief. Baptized Muslims are severely persecuted by families. Baha’i groups are persecuted in Iran.

This is a part of the cultural process of change. A group comes up with an innovative cultural idea that varies from the mainstream. The alternative group is persecuted, which makes them tightly knit. The persecuted group is granted sympathy by some of the mainstream culture. This grants them a semi-legitimate status, which the authorities tend not to recognize. Then the culture adopts the alternative group as their own, thus changing the landscape of the mainstream culture.

However, it is damaging to grant established religious groups protected or a special status. First of all, it circumvents the process of normal cultural change. It grants an established group the status of a persecuted group, and even more. This causes damage to the established group, in many ways. First of all, because the leaders of the group tend to be afforded the status and comforts of important leaders, they do not normally strive for truth or morality, nor are they given to the energetic exuberance that truth-seekers are known for. Yes, truth-seekers can be guilty of tunnel vision or judgmentalism, but that is how new ideas are born.

If religious leaders are striving after status and comfort instead of truth, then they tend to fall back on traditionalism and ritual, which are the real killers of religion. If a religion is only looking to the past for truth, instead of applying truth and morality to modern circumstances, then the religion is fit for only those who look to the past. For this reason, energetic groups can die as their congregation ages. They are stuck in tradition and ritual and so have nothing to offer young people. And it is this traditionalism that often destroys any positive progress and forces people to live in old ways that don’t work for the new cultural mainstream. Nor do they challenge the cultural mainstream with a better ethical perspective.