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My experience with anything like this is that, whatever the original intentions to listen may be, it quickly becomes dominated by Christians.
I keep trying, but I’m thick that way 🤷♀️
Some groups limit the number of Christians in order to avoid this problem. This also elevates minority religions.
I used to have a friendship that was primarily based around arguing with a Seventh Day Adventist. I’m an atheist. Somehow this worked? More so because of my friend than because of me - I was blunt, to say the least, and young and adrift and bad at people. But she enjoyed this somehow.
Looking back, those were among the most forthright, honest, yet mutually respectful arguments I’ve ever had with anyone. We never crossed the line, or at least not enough to upset us, into insulting each other as people, even though we insulted each others’ worldviews on the regular.
In the end this experience actually made me even more anti-theistic than I had been, through the sheer mindboggling frustration of trying to argue about evolution with someone who I knew, for absolute certain fact, was brilliant when it came to anything else. My friend was fantastic at science and at talking about science… Until it came to a subject their religion demanded they take a particular view on. Their views remained, so far as I could tell, stubbornly and entirely unchanged.
But I lost touch with them a long time ago - I hope they haven’t fallen in with the far-right bigotry by now, but honestly, it’s possible. But equally possible, they might have eventually broken out of that fundamentalism to some degree. I suspect it might depend on whether they left home to go to college or whether they stayed put and got married quickly.
In my experience, atheists are more knowledgeable about religions than believers. It’s often enlightening to have atheists in religious dialog. Unfortunately we haven’t been able to include atheists in the dialog where i live.
That’s sometimes true in circles where “religion” = Christianity and little else.
Is LGTBQ+ ofren a strain on interreligious dialog?
Depends on the specific participants. There are queer positive organisations and/or individuals in most religions. If you opened it up to the internet, someone would come in specifically to strain things because that’s how the internet works these days.
