Last night I had a dream.
I dreamt of a future — or present — where everybody competed in sports events. Everybody belonged to a team. They didn’t train as a team though. People trained with members of other teams, but competed in their own teams — even against the people they’d trained with.
In this reality, relationships between members of two different teams was frowned upon. Sure, they laughed, joked, and trained together, but when it came to relationships, if you got romantically involved with somebody from another team, your own team members looked down upon you, called you traitor, and were downright cruel to you.
I was caught up in thinking about this reality, and for a while I was lost in the story in my dream — and yes, there was a story, but that’s not relevant to this post 😃
As I thought more about my dream society, I realized that that society was already here, in our own world — it’s just that instead of sports teams, we divide along the lines of race, religion, cast, language, nationality etc. But the behaviour is generally the same.
As this realization came to me, I also realized that generally, people fall into two categories — those whose faith embraces everyone else, and those whose faith excludes everyone except for a select few. The first is born of love, the latter from hatred.
Sure, you might say that that’s an over-generalization. There are those without faith — those who don’t believe in a God, or those who don’t believe in religion at all. But I’m not really talking of faith in a religious sense here — if you believe that there is no religion, isn’t that faith of a sort as well?
I’m sure you see the same two categories I mentioned above amongst those who refute religion or say they only believe in science, as amongst those who claim to believe a particular religion— there are those who are happy to believe what they believe and let others believe what they want, and there are those who are rabid about making sure to let the others know how wrong they are.
I would prefer to be in the first group, the one whose faith — whatever it might be — is all inclusive.
What about you?
