What’s the point of public preaching?
No, seriously. I genuinely don’t see the purpose.
You express your love of the almighty publicly, as loud as possible. Okay, then what?
Do you do such thing simply because you want to express your love of God as loud as possible and you don’t care how others may perceive you? I will accept that reasoning, as much as I disagree with your approach. At least, I can compare you to those zealous obsessive nerds.
Do you do such thing because you want to spread the messages, to bring others into the spiritual light? Well, that tactic of yours can backfire.
Here’s something that many people are still in denial about: globally, religious people have a bad rep. Not only we are infamous for being scientifically illiterate, we are also infamous for shoving our beliefs down other people’s throats.
You loudly vomit your messages, ensuring every nearest person can hear you, whether they like it or not. Heck, you even do that in enclosed public spaces like crowded moving trains, where people have a harder time avoiding you.
No, you are not being physically coercive. But, in those people’s minds, you are still unbelievably obnoxious. In fact, if they already had bad perceptions of religious people, your behaviours will only intensify the negativity.
How will you respond to this? If you genuinely have no desire to be forceful and you are worried your actions get misconstrued, you will learn to be more tactful by reading the rooms.
if you refuse to acknowledge that the ugly behaviours of religious people can ignite anti-religious sentiments, insisting those people have zero experiences with religions, you won’t take the criticism seriously. In fact, you will get even more obnoxious, more eager to impose “your religious experiences” to as many people as possible.
Of course, you may also argue your public preaching is meant for your fellow believers. But, that still does not make any sense.
For one, you have your own places of worship. Why don’t you preach in the places where you find fellow believers who actually can appreciate your words? Why do you prefer waste your time and energy preaching to non-believers?
Second, and you will have a hard time accepting this: you don’t represent every religious person, you represent yourselves and yourselves only. Your way of life is not universal, not even among your fellow believers.
Believe it or not, there are religious people who can feel spiritually-fulfilled without bragging about how spiritually-fulfilled they are. In fact, they squirm at the idea of it.
Not to mention, they may start feeling ashamed of their religiosity. Deep down, they know you don’t represent them. But, unfortunately, humans love guilty by association mentality, which means they get themselves unfairly lumped with loathsome fanatics like you.
And because of the involuntary association, they end up feeling ashamed of their own religiosity. While ideally we shouldn’t care too much about what others think of us, ignoring social shame is easier said than done.
In worse cases, they may end up leaving religion altogether.
No, I am not committing slippery slope fallacy here. The thing is I am basing my arguments on my own experiences and, more importantly, other people’s.
I have interacted with other religious people. My offline interactions mostly involve Protestants, fellow Sunni Muslims and, to a lesser extent, Buddhists and Catholics and my online ones are more religiously diverse. Many of them do share my frustration regarding the believers who besmirch the name of their own supposedly-beloved religions with their fanaticism.
And I have definitely interacted with anti-religion people online, a kind of people I would argue with ten years ago (I am certain it was at the peak of New Atheism). Apart from their assertion that religions defy reason, they also invoke their own bad personal experiences with religions; in fact, many of them are former religious fanatics themselves.
Obviously, my words are not scientific; my sample is not representative, as it only covers my own social circles. But, they still have weight because not only I listen what others have to say, I also refuse to invalidate their life experiences, even though I cannot relate to them and their worldview contradicts mine.
Meanwhile, people like you love to dismiss other people’s life experiences. You think religious people who despise your zeal are fake, blasphemous believers and you think formerly religious atheists were never faithful in the first place, insisting their hatred of religion is caused by their lack of faith.
You are unable to comprehend that you can acknowledge other people’s experiences without ever personally relating to them, without ever aligning with their worldview.
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