One of the worst things about western religion is the emphasis on good vs evil.

Dividing the world in such a black-and-white way can lead to truly awful behavior. For example, if your group is good and the other group is evil, there’s no incentive to be kind and compassionate. After all, if something is evil, you don’t try to work with it or understand its point of view. You don’t even have to be nice. Why would you? It’s pure evil. The only thing you do with evil is defeat it. You simply must destroy it by any means necessary.

In America we’re now seeing this play out on a mass scale. Religion has taught people to view the world this way, and now it’s been weaponized for political gain by bad actors like Donald Trump, QAnon, and Libs of TikTok. We now have large numbers of people who believe that Democrats are doing child sexual abuse literally all the time, and also they’re making kids gay.

And why are the Democrats doing this? Because they’re evil. No other explanation is needed. Republicans are good, Democrats are evil. That’s it, that’s the entire philosophy.

Western religion teaches people two things:

  1. Evidence doesn’t matter
  2. The world is black and white

Basically, everything is either good or evil, and you don’t need to be able to prove it.

On the other hand, eastern religion tends to focus on enlightenment vs ignorance. This is much more useful and healthy in my opinion.