This week: Sharing Your Faith Edited by: Kitti the Red-Nosed Feline  
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Who do you share your faith with? How do you share it? Have you found your methods to be effective? Or do you feel that people do not want to hear about what you believe?
This week's Spiritual Newsletter is all about sharing your faith.
Kitti the Red-Nosed Feline |
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At the end of last year I created a contest here on Writing.Com called "Share Your Faith" [13+]. I had several reasons for the creation of this contest:
 I love reading and learning about different faiths and beliefs.
I think that if we're going to create a better world, we've got to work together and in order to do so, we've got to learn about the other and understand the other.
I figured I would find interesting items to highlight in this newsletter.
The amount of entries I have received thus far is very low. My stating that here is not a complaint, but I do admit to being surprised. When I first had the idea I thought that on a large website such as this there must be people of a variety of different faiths. I still have no doubt that that is indeed the case, but they're not as interested in sharing their work as I'd hoped for. Now, it may be that it's a bad contest. It may also be that people don't want to talk about their beliefs. What drove me to write this newsletter, however, is the possibility that people daren't talk about it.
We live in a world in which pretty much anything we say and do leaves us open to being placed on social media and bullied by a large amount of people. I have seen a friend of mine being attacked in such a manner and driven off Twitter and YouTube simply because she posted a tweet about how she felt that hospitals and some other organisations could improve on their safeguarding procedures – she is an experienced social worker. Some people took offence, for some reason, and encouraged others to say nasty things to her, and it went on and on and on, and became increasingly extreme. Eventually, she figured it wasn't worth the stress, and she closed her accounts. I went through something similar when I published some articles on how we could improve day-to-day life for people with disabilities and people with chronic health problems. It's amazing what attracts threatening messages. If that can set some people off, matters of faith certainly can, too. It's the general advice, isn't it? Avoid discussions about politics and religion.
Except, it's silly. There ought to be room for sharing one's faith. Naturally, if one promotes one's faith by attacking someone else's, a negative reaction is pretty much guaranteed. Even if no negative reaction is forthcoming, it is unlikely to win them over. Let's say, however, that you simply want to share what your faith means to you. Or, you felt inspired to write a poem with a faith-based message. You should feel perfectly free to do this. You shouldn't feel concerned about it attracting unpleasant responses.
The good news is that Writing.Com is a very safe place if you want to write and post items about your faith. This isn't Twitter, or YouTube, or even Facebook, where nastiness is all too often the order of the day. We are fortunate to have a welcoming and supportive community of writers and if anyone were to ever send you anything abusive, the Staff would deal with it swiftly. I have been a member for nearly 16 years and have never received an abusive review. That doesn't mean, of course, that every single review I have received has sung my praises and been accompanied by a 5-star rating, but nobody has been unpleasant or rude about my beliefs. The feedback that I have received that wasn't along the lines of “this is great, I love it” has been helpful and constructive on the whole. Which is wonderful, because I want to improve my writing.
One good way to help you remain safe online is to set your items to only be visible to registered users of the site, or even to registered authors only. That way, people Googling around won't stumble upon your items and, potentially, think to contact you. I have most of my work set to members of W.Com only. An added bonus is that publications tend to consider publicly available works as already published, and reject them on that basis. Items with restricted access tend to not be classed as such.
I still believe what I said above – that if we are going to create a better world together, we need to learn about the other and understand the other. There's a lot of misunderstanding going around about the various faiths and spiritual paths that people have embarked on. By sharing the truth we can take a step – possibly even a leap – towards peaceful cooperation.
Or so I hope. It is possible that I am over-idealistic. Still, we've got to start somewhere, right?
Kitti the Red-Nosed Feline
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Some contests and events to inspire you:
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If you need a nudge to tidy your portfolio:
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The Spiritual Newsletter Team welcomes any and all questions, suggestions, thoughts and feedback, so please don't hesitate to write in! 
The nomination period for "The Quills" [ASR], 2019 edition has closed. Judging is about to begin. If you would like to help judge any of the main categories, please check out Elle - on hiatus  's note: "Note: [Image #2213296]
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Wishing you a week filled with inspiration,
The Spiritual Newsletter Team
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Spiritual: February 19, 2020 Issue [#10031]
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