Religion Is Not A Competition

It is unfortunate, but some people like to compare their religion with other religions. It becomes a matter of pride for them, to compare and find reasons to feel superior to others.

"My religion is the best and the more tolerant. My religion is more progressive. Men and Women have equal rights in my religion."

We like to make groups and communities, it is an important part of our nature. We have created religions, nations, football clubs, groups on social media, etc. to give us a sense of belongingness. That is how we survived, and now it is deeply rooted in our nature.

There may exist some competition between nations or football clubs, but competition between religions is not at all possible.

It is a well established principle that, when there is competition, there is innovation and development. Nations are developing new technologies, and researching new medicines. Football clubs and investing time and resources to train better to become the best club.

However, I don't see any research and development or any innovation being made in religions. Their doctrines are still the same, no new philosophy has been added to their text or removed.

In fact, if there is anything new in religion, that is their way of interpretation, as it changes overtime. You can call it development, but that is not because of competition.

Let me explain it with an example of Messaging Apps.

Let us assume, Telegram was the first app to add sticker support. Soon after, other apps like Signal and WhatsApp also added this feature.
Why? Because there exists a competition among these apps, users prefer to use a feature rich app for communicating with their friends.

Signal added group video calls and within a few months Telegram also added that feature. And again this is because of competition among these apps.

Now, what does this have to do with religions?

The point I'm trying to make is that, if you want to claim that your religion is the best, you can, you have full freedom to do that. But it is unreasonable to do that as there is no competition between religions. Because there are no good or bad cultures, there are just cultures, different cultures.

If you want to be proud of your religion and want it to be the best in the world, you can simply learn from messaging apps.

Either Telegram can feel proud that they added stickers many years before others did, or they can develop more awesome feature, otherwise other apps will make them obsolete.

The users also want their favourite messaging app to be the best. And to achieve that they request new feature, find bugs and contribute in the development of the app.

In other words, either you can be proud of your religion as it gave basic human rights to women way before any other religion did, or you can advocate for more basic rights not only for women, but also for people from lower caste and the third gender.

Go demand more features like, the acceptance of same-sex marriages.