Being a Pakistani and living 18 years of my life in this country I have seen many issues that are either acknowledged but never brought up or acknowledged and brought up, but given a different meaning and direction. One of the issues that people do not ever talk about or even acknowledge as a real issue is the huge different between culture and religion. These two things go hand in hand with each other but are different. Culture is developed when people follow a certain way of life and religion is a belief of living one's life a certain way. While culture maybe influenced by religion, but not following any religion and doing one's own thing is a culture too. So when people talk about a country like Pakistan, where Islam became a so called culture just because 98% of the population practices Islam, or at least claims to, the world perceives Pakistan differently. Violence and bad stuff is on the newspapers, televisions, social media and basically every person is affected by the negativity around the globe and the world begins to think, "Oh, Muslims are bad!" or "Islam preaches extremism" and just make assumptions and pass it on to other people. It all builds stereotypes that people start believing as if those assumptions are real facts. It starts to divide us. Just because people claim to belong to a particular religion and not actually follow it and put their own negativity out here does not make the religion bad. Just because violence at one point had become the culture of Pakistan does not make Islam bad or any religion that the rest of the 2% population practices bad. It was the culture that was not healthy at all because our people were not educated the way they should have been, but religion had nothing to do with it. In fact, I believe no religion is bad. Religions were created so we can make the most of our lives with the help of certain set of instructions given to us. I would love to know if anyone in this discussion thinks similarly or view the entire situation differently or just would like to add on to my opinion! Thank you for reading it!
