Thoughts on religion from the road

Clutching my passport and scanning the overhead signs for the English words “visa” or “customs,” I asked myself for the first time in six months what I thought I was doing.

I was a biology student who had aspired toward medical school and planned to spend the entire summer preparing for the MCAT. So how did I come to find myself flying alone to Istanbul for a 15-day religious and historical tour of Turkey?

My dream of medical school was all but abandoned by the time I found myself in Istanbul’s Ataturk Airport, but I still felt like the misfit skeptic on this religious excursion.

My experience with religion to that point had been a tumultuous and twisting road. The son of a liberal-leaning Methodist minister, I turned to extremely conservative Christianity in early high school.

But as I became more conscious of other worldviews and grew more dissatisfied with the narrow and rigid nature of my own, I began traversing a more secular road. Over time I found myself drawn toward strict atheism and even antitheism in my early college career.

By the time my religious studies professor asked me if I was interested in going to Turkey, I had settled into a more tolerant form of agnostic atheism. I preached tolerance, but my pride made me less than accepting of anyone adhering to a strongly differing belief system.

So despite going into the trip in the most open-minded way I could, I soon found myself in a heated discussion with a newfound friend about why I thought her belief in astrology was pointless. It was only days later that I fully realized how ultimately futile and even spiteful it was for me to begin the argument.

This girl wasn’t disenfranchising anyone; she wasn’t trying to prevent gay people, women or any other oppressed group from gaining rights. And she wasn’t denying evolution or climate change or trying to stop them from being taught in schools.

I only cared about her belief in astrology because I wanted to prove her wrong. It was a fruitless exercise made not for the sake of some greater good — I wasn’t standing up for someone’s rights or trying to make my friend somehow “better” — but for the sake of my own pride.

The idea that we should always live for the sake and benefit of others over that of ourselves became a theme on the Turkey trip. And greater than any souvenir or picture, it was what I hoped to bring back to Chapel Hill.

As long as we remember that everyone around us is a person with his or her own thoughts, emotions, beliefs and histories, we can remember to set aside our own biases and ideologies and do what we can to make our neighbors’ lives better.