Religious Discrimination

Telling someone “Just because you can’t do things to other people in the name of your religion doesn’t mean that you are experiencing religious discrimination” rarely is the “QED” of the argument because it presupposes that practitioners of said religion will stop what they’re doing and conclude “Oh gosh, I didn’t want to do that!”

That is very unlikely to happen because it ignores the notion that “doing things to other people in the name of religion” is the purpose of said religion, and as such, qualifies in the eyes of said practitioners as precisely religious discrimination.

Of course, simply being “religious discrimination” doesn’t automatically mean the behavior is worthwhile to pursue or worthwhile to exterminate. After all, history is littered with an ocean of corpses who experienced “religious discrimination,” and anyone subscribing to a modern religion as “less primitive and savage” eventually comes to understand what it means when that particular poison dart circles back around.

Religious discrimination means that the differences presented by a religion have become socially or otherwise problematic to such a degree that people notice and start pushing back. Historically, this means the religion has a choice: adapt to the times or fall upon the dustheap of religions that have clung so desperately to their dogma that they perished*. There is a third option, of course, and that’s fight back tooth and nail, killing everyone who is causing the trouble. But so far, no religion on Earth has survived that kind of savagery for long. Even Christianity had to kinda downplay all their murdery history in order to be allowed to occasionally sit at the grown-ups table.

* OR BE MINED BY COMIC BOOK PUBLISHERS LOOKING FOR VILLAINS, BUT THAT’S NONE OF MY BUSINESS.