The Cost of Not Knowing — A Plea Against Religious Analphabetism within a broader perspective

By lilly_en_route

In a world that’s more connected than ever, we’re shockingly unprepared for one of the simplest, yet most profound tasks: understanding each other. I find myself troubled by the growing tide of religious analphabetism — not just a lack of faith, but a profound ignorance of what faith means to others. It’s the kind of ignorance that builds walls instead of bridges, that turns a deaf ear to prayers simply because they’re spoken in a different language, or not at all. And I can’t help but wonder: how many of our conflicts, our prejudices, our quiet judgments stem from this very blindness?

It’s easy to dismiss what we don’t understand. A headscarf becomes a threat. A cross, a symbol of oppression. A mosque, a foreign body in the cityscape. We avert our eyes from scriptures we haven’t read, holidays we don’t celebrate, rituals we can’t explain. It’s easier that way. Safer. But what is the cost of this safety? What do we sacrifice in this comfort zone of ignorance?

We lose the stories that could have mended our hearts, the parables that might have taught us mercy. We miss out on the shared grief of mothers burying sons, whether in Gaza, Tel Aviv or simply in Paris, whether they wear hijabs or crucifixes or nothing at all. We become tourists in each other’s pain, snapping photos but never really seeing.

How many times have we scrolled past headlines of massacres at synagogues, temples, churches, thinking, “That’s sad, but it’s not my faith”? How many of us understand why a Sikh man wears a turban, why a Muslim fasts 30 days in random seasons, why a Jew keeps kosher, why a Christian marks her forehead with ash on a cold February morning? The truth is, our ignorance isn’t passive. It’s an active choice, a decision to close our eyes and call it peace.

But peace built on blindness is no peace at all. It’s a truce waiting to collapse at the first sound of foreign prayers. We must do better.

We must learn — not to convert, but to comprehend. Not to agree, but to empathise. To sit in a mosque and marvel at the call to prayer and inviting friends to join celebrating Eid, to light a menorah with friends and understand the miracle of oil, to see the ashes and remember that we are dust, and to dust, we shall return. To read the Bhagavad Gita not as scripture, but as poetry. To hear the silence of an atheist and know that it, too, is a form of faith.

If we don’t, if we continue to choose the darkness of ignorance over the light of understanding, we are complicit in the hatred that blooms from misunderstanding. We are no better than the zealots we so quickly condemn.

So here’s my plea: read. Read the Quran and the Bible, the Torah and the Vedas, the words of saints and skeptics alike. Ask questions not to argue, but to understand. Walk into temples, mosques, churches, not as a tourist but as a guest. Be willing to feel uncomfortable, to have your certainties unraveled and rewoven with threads of compassion.

Because at the end of the day, our world doesn’t need more tolerance. It needs more tenderness. And tenderness begins with the courage to know each other truly.

We cannot afford the self-comfort of religious analphabetism. Not now. Not ever.
Let’s learn to read each other’s hearts.