Not my religion please!

Everyone hates religious bigotry until the bigotry starts to come from their own religion. Then it becomes "don't say anything about my religion without getting multiple PhDs in our theology and history". Or "we have been tolerating for ages and we can't tolerate anymore".

Truth is that even within the context of their religion, such people make two fundamental errors. First, they speak for their entire religion and all its followers - "we Hindus / Muslims / Sikhs / Christians will not tolerate anymore".

They say we because they need to pretend their religion is a monolith and that any opposition you have towards their conduct is hate towards an entire community. This is never the case. The outraged are speaking for all of their co-religionists not because everyone needs their support. But because they need the support of their community to justify their behaviour. It's cowardice pretending to be courageous.

The second error is that they think they have some kind of supremely accurate, untarnished understanding of their religion that is not possessed by anyone else. They seem to be of the opinion that anyone studying their religion will come to the same conclusion as they have and decide that their religion is so pristine and pure that the only reason someone might have a problem with it is if they are dishonest or ignorant. So their outrage flips back and forth between "you're lying" to "you don't understand".

Religions were made to serve human beings and not the other way around. If your idea of the sacred allows you to prioritise a book over a human life, then your religion and you are just the same as all those other religions that you have no problem criticising.

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