I notice how some people use their religion/spiritual practice as a way to distance from people, including to affirm a belief and practice of categorizing those, or many of those, not within their religion/spiritual group/path as inferior. I think this is very easy for us as humans to do and something to be mindfully watchful of and avoid slipping into doing.
Brief Thoughts on Religion/Spiritual Paths and Exclusion
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The Practical, Fanciful Pagan 
Oddly enough I was thinking about this very thing on Sunday during my UU spirituality group when we were discussing Buddhism. That’s another story though. There seems to be some kind of bizarre programming in our DNA that makes us seek out certain select similarities with others, then focus on how those who do not share those similarities in any apparent way are “other” and must be excluded somehow. Sometimes it’s really obvious on the surface, and sometimes it’s really subconscious/subliminal. I think it must go way back in time and we just haven’t managed to use our now highly developed frontal lobes well enough to just stop doing it. We can change. I mean, you see all these wonderfully inspiring videos about interspecies friendships that go against all programming. I guess somehow we’re just so culturally habituated to categorizing people as “like me/belongs” or “not like me/other” we just don’t bother to change. Sigh.
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I agree, we can change, even though many don’t bother to work on doing so.
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