Introduction: Three Open Wounds Around Religion
I’m not trying to destroy religion. Nor to defend it. What I want — or maybe what I need — is to understand it.
To open it. To breathe it. To begin to unravel, as much as I can, that deep knot that’s been tangled for centuries between faith, power, history, and truth.
These reflections are born primarily from my relationship with Catholic Christianity, because that’s the tradition I’ve lived closest to. I’m not a theologian, nor do I claim to be one (yet). But something inside me won’t stop asking questions.
And while many of these questions are aimed at Christianity, I suspect they touch something shared by other monotheistic religions too.
So far, I’ve identified three points — three wounds — that I simply cannot ignore.
Perpetual Duality.
Or Good and Evil as Absolute Truths
There’s something deeply unsettling about the idea that good and evil are universal, objective, fixed — and that human beings, in all our fragility, our stories, our flesh, are somehow capable of perceiving them without contaminating that vision with our own wounds, prejudices, or fears.
But how can a profoundly limited being — shaped by its context, emotions, personal history, material needs — really access a pure, absolute moral truth?
To me, this assumption ignores our human fragility, our unconscious projections, our biases and defense mechanisms.
Claiming we can legislate or act from a universal, unchanging morality feels, in a way, like an act of epistemological arrogance.
Do we truly believe that someone can speak in the name of pure good? Of absolute evil?
That our laws, our wars, our religious institutions were born from a clean, neutral, transcendent vision?
I don’t think so. I can’t think so. Because humans are complex, contradictory, limited.
And any morality that presents itself as “revealed” but refuses to acknowledge that limitation feels more like a reflection of fear than wisdom.
More a need — or, for those who prefer it, a deliberate strategy — for control than a gesture of compassion.
Untouchable Rules.
Or the Fear of Updating Our Interpretation of Scripture
The second point has to do with the strong resistance we tend to have toward updating or reinterpreting religious texts and doctrines.
There’s an implicit fear that if we “touch” these texts, we’ll devalue them.
As if rereading them, questioning them, would take away their power or truth.
But I believe the opposite: the true power of sacred texts lies in their ability to speak to different generations, in different contexts, through fresh readings.
Isn’t it love that makes us ask questions? Isn’t real respect what pushes us to revisit, to confront, to grow alongside what we love?
Just as we learn, over the years, to see our parents through more human eyes — not gods, not monsters, just people with their own struggles, mistakes, and decisions shaped by fear or love — I believe we can look at the authors, interpreters, and transmitters of sacred texts in the same way.
People who lived in different centuries, in different bodies, with different urgencies. People with strategies to be heard, to survive — both themselves and the message they were trying to carry.
No matter how connected they were to the divine — through study, meditation, or even enlightenment — they were still human.
And for that very reason, their words must be read with humanity, with historical awareness, and with an ethics rooted in the present.
Their views on good and evil, the body, power, or justice were inevitably shaped by the world around them.
Acknowledging this doesn’t invalidate their words — it demands that we read them with discernment.
Even Christianity’s central figure, Jesus, reflects this tension: the fact that he incarnated as a man is no coincidence. In that time, in that place, it was likely the only way people would listen.
No one would have followed a woman the way they followed Jesus. No one would have believed a girl.
Even the divine, to manifest within human history, had to adapt to cultural codes. And that tells us something crucial: we must understand the limits of every era. We must read the eternal through the lens of the temporal.
Reward and Punishment.
Or Heaven and Hell as Fixed Destinations
And finally, there’s another theme that’s been with me for years: how religion presents the fate of the soul.
You’re born. You live. Your body dies. And your soul — so we’re told — goes to heaven or hell. As if existence were a single journey with two final stops.
A reward or a punishment. White or black. Light or shadow.
But this doesn’t reflect the cyclical, spiral, intricate nature of life — or of nature itself.
And above all: let’s step back from moral judgment.
Where is the process?
Where is the rhythm, the flow of all that lives?
So much has been said about heaven and hell. They’re usually portrayed as final destinations: a soul lives, dies, and ends up in one of the two.
But that image doesn’t resonate with me. It doesn’t speak to me. It doesn’t include me.
It doesn’t reflect what I intuit in the nature of existence itself. To me, heaven and hell are not places — not punishments, not rewards. They are ways of experiencing the soul’s next chapter.
They’re natural consequences — not ethical ones — of how we’ve related to ourselves, to others, to life. There is no “better” or “worse” state. Just different experiences.
Some people nurture a deeper connection with themselves, with their emotions, with the living world around them.
Others don’t — and not because they’re bad or careless. They simply live from a different place. Maybe they seek intensity, challenge, contrast. Maybe they do it out of instinct or necessity. And that too is valid. What changes is not the “value” of the soul, but the type of practical training it has received. Like someone who’s trained their body for a race, and someone who hasn’t. Neither is more valuable than the other. But if one day they both decide to climb a mountain, they’ll probably experience the climb differently. Not because one is “right” and the other “wrong,” but because their bodies have prepared in different ways. And that difference will be felt. That’s all.
There’s no guilt. No reward. No punishment. Only practical consequences.
In that sense, “paradise” can be understood as a future experience where things flow more easily — not because you “earned” it, but because you’ve developed inner tools that allow you to move through it with less resistance.
“Hell,” on the other hand, might be a more chaotic, dense phase — not as a penalty, but simply because there are still things you haven’t seen, understood, or chosen to face.
And that’s okay too. It’s all part of the process.
There isn’t one single valid path. Some souls seek clarity. Others seek conflict. Some move inward. Others move outward. It’s not about forcing anyone to “wake up,” or judging those who don’t. What matters is remembering that — like with any kind of training — each of us navigates life with the tools we’ve chosen (or not chosen) to develop.
Conclusion: Toward a New Language of the Sacred
I’m not writing this to convince anyone. Nor to offer an alternative doctrine (yet). All I’m bringing here is an honest need to ask questions. To imagine faith as something that breathes, that transforms, that allows itself to be touched by life. I still believe there’s something deeply valuable in spirituality, in the symbolic, in the search for the unseen.
But I also believe it’s time to revisit the languages we use to name the sacred. Because any language that refuses to evolve, that resists being shaped by human experience, ends up becoming a prison rather than a path.
There’s no perfect map.
No doctrine without cracks.
But perhaps — just perhaps — the most divine thing we can do is look at those cracks without fear. And dare to walk through them, even if we don’t yet know where they’ll lead. If you’ve made it this far, I’d love to hear your thoughts in the comments. Tell me about yourself, your beliefs, or what this text stirred in you. Let’s talk, even just as a simple exercise in soul-mind delight.