Ideas Don't Belong to Anyone
An Important Re-Minder.
One of the most important things I've learned in my recovery from fundamentalism: IDEAS DON'T BELONG TO ANYONE.
It's very common for people to erroneously rationalize: "Only [ideological group] believes [XYZ], therefore if you believe [XYZ] you must be a [member of ideological group]!"
The perfect illustration: The abortion debate raging on at the moment.
Many "pro choicers" are conflating anti-abortion rhetoric with Christianity (making this a "separation of church and state" debate), despite the vast wellspring of secular rhetoric around what constitutes life and personhood.
Similarly, many "pro lifers" are conflating all pro-abortion rhetoric with Satanism, and hopefully I don't need to tell you how villainizing large swaths of people like that is brain-deadening.
When you swiftly categorize and compartmentalize people's ideas before actually HEARING and CONSIDERING them, you:
cheat yourself out of what could be deeper access to Truth and wisdom conveyed by (necessarily imperfect) messengers, and
perhaps more importantly, you prevent all parties involved from experiencing the Love that can only come from being genuinely seen, heard and appreciated in one's messy, nuanced, complicated and contradictory completeness.
Once you accept that any idea can be held by any person, regardless of their abstract ideological identification, it opens up your perceptual capacity to exercise more genuine empathy and understanding for your fellow humans.