I was having this convo with my family after we went to a temple, and I’m from India, so usually the temples here have crazy crowds, so we went through a line where you need to buy passes to skip the queue. We did that, and imagine the idol of the god is like two rooms back, and the doors to these rooms are open so people can see the idol and pray. So people without the passes in the normal line wait hours so they can see the gods idol and pray, and they are literally yanked ahead within two seconds, and we, the ones with passes, get to pray from a room ahead of them and get to stand and pray there for a longer period of time. And there is one more tier, btw, where you pay more money to get to touch the deity’s feet. Insane, I know.
So my sister said to her husband (my brother-in-law) as a joke, “You need to earn more so we can get closer to god so I asked curiously, “Why? Do we get a step ahead if we pay more?” And she said, “Yes.” So I said, “We did pay, and we still didn’t get to touch the feet, but some people stand in these lines all day long and don’t even get to look at the idol for more than two seconds and have to pray from further away.” (I wasn’t accusing them or anything; I was just pointing it out, but in hindsight, I guess they might have taken offence to this. I did try to tell them I wasn’t pointing fingers at anyone; I was just trying to say it would be better if we lived in a world like that.) So my sister said, “We earn the money through hard work as well so we can pay for this.” And I said, “But we, the humans, created this whole system. I don’t think god would approve of this.” And she asked, “Okay, so what do you think should happen?” I said, “They should also get to pray from the same distance as us at the very least.” So her husband chimed in, saying, “If you think like that, then you can just pray from the comfort of your home as well.” And I was like, “Yes, exactly my point, but that’s a whole other conversation.” Then he says, “You’re thinking from an emotional perspective. You shouldn’t ever think like that; think from a practical perspective always.” Then he goes on to say, “If a lion thinks emotionally, he’ll die of hunger.” At this point, I understood there is no point left to this conversation anymore, so I just shut up because, like you can’t change people’s long-built perspectives through one conversation, so I just decided to shut up. Also, I didn’t want to offend anybody, and their tones suggested I did, so I just thought there is no point explaining myself.
The cherry on top is that I know I’m an emotional thinker. I put it above all, but I don’t think that’s something you get to control; it just happens, and I do end up getting hurt a lot of the times because of it. And literally, in the evening, I did get hurt because of something that happened where I was thinking emotionally and got hurt, and now I’m thinking, “Maybe there’s something wrong with me?”