I want to ask some questions, These are real questions that I'm asking without thinking that I already know the answers. Have you ever seen people debating day after day, week after week, month after month, about some group or category of people that you're part of, without ever doing anything to inform themselves about it? Have you ever tried helping any of those people debating about it understand it better?
Yes and Yes.
Have you ever seen that making any difference in the way they debate about it?
yes.
Really, if you ever have seen it making any difference, I would like to know more about what you did.
I myself didn't do anything special with the ones that changed their ways and the ones that didn't.
The difference is in the person changing his mind. Some reflected on what was being said, realized they were wrong and then subsequently their views. Others didn't do that and just stuck their heads in the sand.
That's on them off course.
Now that I think about it though, the real problem for me is not so much what people think about my religion. The real problem for me is people not informing themselves about what they're debating about, and I might already be doing everything I want to do about that.
In the case of specific religions, sure, I will fully acknowledge that I haven't spend any real time studying any of them. Some religions I know more about then others, some less. I think I'm reasonably well versed in christianity and to a lesser extent judaism and islam. I also know a thing or two about scientology and understand more or less what the ancient greek, roman, egyptian and viking conceptions of gods were like.
Of all, I probably know the least about hinduism when it concerns contemporary religions with sizeable following.
But that doesn't bother me at all.
Because they all fall under the same umbrella:
religion.
Religions are a specific type of belief systems. The various religions is just content.
The way I see it, "religion" is a like a language and the various specific religions are like dialects.
In understand the language and frankly I'm just not that interested in the dialects to go an study them all. It would also be a rather arbitrary thing since I'ld have to choose which religions to study and which not, since studying ALL religions would take multiple life times. So right out the gates, i'm supposed to allready decide in advance, without any research, which religions are more likely to be true (because I'ld rather study things that are potentially correct - since i'ld have to invest quite some time in it. time that could be better spend in other ways).
So in short, I feel like I explored religion more then well enough to have a generalized opinion about it. To the point that I know that my stance on "religion" as a concept, isn't going to change by the
contents of any single specific religion.
In ultra-short: knowing what I know, I consider additional study of specific religions to be a complete waste of time.