How can people learn or understand if they can’t ask for help to learn?
There are actually lots of resources about this on the internet that you can look at rather than asking pwd directly to educate you, because it is exhausting and I get that lots of people have these questions, but also – again – there are many resources about it on the internet. It is both draining and isolating feeling as if you need to be constantly educating people around you and convincing them that you’re not just trying to weasel out of working or whatever.
I disagree with this. Definitely there are many examples of organised religion being perfect case studies of the adage that power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely. But there are also many ways that religious communities support each other and their wider communities, outside just providing a doctrinal “granule of truth”.
Sikhism I think is most famous for this, and I feel like at least where I live whenever something bad happens in the background on the news I see Sikh communities mobilising to render assistance.
Similarly, the denomination I was brought up in (church of christ) has always been oriented, both in theory and practice, around doing community work first and debating doctrine a fairly distant second (also, each church of christ congregation is an independent entity, which I think has probably contributed to it being able to maintain its strong community-first focus over time).