Let's just try to walk through the experience from my perspective. Whenever religious attitudes get brought up here, usually you'll see posts which adopt a more neutral if perhaps slightly condescending attitude, along with posts that are more emotionally charged and (shall we politely say) reductive. Both usually have around the same upvote counts. Now, by any rational measure, this is an issue which I should be able to contribute positively on. I spent six to eight years of my life reading about four hundred pages a week on the specific subject of theory of knowledge in Anthropology ... ie how cultural factors shape how people think about things. It is crazy that my insights would not be viewed as useful. But it's difficult for me to even have a conversation on the subject. I try to bring up that I don't even like the term religious, because I think that it homogenizes a broad range of wildly different practices. I get told that this is me being sneaky with my language and that "words mean things". I admit to holding beliefs which westerners would classify as "religious", and I get told that I'm just not good at critical thinking and I believe that some two thousand year old book teaches truth, but so long as I don't try to harm anyone that's okay. As I mentioned above, I'm heavily entrenched in the Advaita and Nyaya traditions, and I hold a particular interest in pramana. The entire point of maintaining a technical school of formal logic over a symbolic school of formal logic is that it formalizes epistemology rather than ontology. The defining characteristic of my belief system is that following rules isn't important, but questioning rules is. It's not that there's any disagreement going on here. We're literally not even having the same conversation. How can we tackle problems in my community (and there are problems) if they can't even understand me when I talk about my community? The most ridiculous thing is that if you want to go after conservative types of dharmic religion, people like me make for natural allies. I actually have a lot of criticisms to make about dharmic religion which are probably a lot more specific than what most white people could come up with. But even my capacity to criticize my own beliefs is perceived as threatening by white people, because my criticism would not be tailored for consumption by white people.

Now, I am not actually all that frustrated that r/lgbt is not versed in the finer points of obscure Astika philosophical paradigms. That's fine. I'm not annoyed that I had to write a small dissertation to communicate the same depth of knowledge about my culture as members of the normative culture are capable of communicating in a meme. That's unfair, but I also understand the circumstances. I'm not even annoyed by the fact that whenever I make a post like this to r/LGBT, I get to enjoy receiving a dozen all-caps regurgitations of The God Delusion getting sent to my inbox (as a person of color I've had lots of real life training with that sort of stuff).

That stuff doesn't really annoy me, because it's kinda to be expected. A lot of people on r/LGBT have been traumatized by these things, and I think that they're coming from an emotionally sincere place, if nothing else. It's also very common for majority white spaces to feel threatened when exposed to non-white perspectives which don't match their expectations, particularly when those perspectives are well-informed or come from a place of authority. That's basically what the whole 'uppity' thing is about. Is that reaction something I particularly love? Eh, I'd say no, but I'm so used to it at this point that I honestly just ignore it. And finally, don't take this the wrong way, but Reddit as a whole skews younger. Umm, there's a bit of a I just took my first Sociology 101 class Dunning-Kruger thing going on here. I know that this sounds like a judgmental observation, but honestly it's the one thing that I empathize with the most. I remember that when I was a freshman in college, I wanted to know why we didn't just get computers to run society, if we knew soooo much about social theory. The thing about studying in a particular field is that pretty soon you look back on your freshman self and think 'wow they were a moron'. So I actually get it when other people are in that same place as I was. I basically expect a certain atmosphere here, and getting annoyed at it is like getting annoyed when rain gets you wet.

But that also sets my expectations. Here's the key point that I've observed: r/LGBT is white as hell. I'm not just talking about the demographic makeup, although also ... sheesh. No, I mean that as a person of color, I try to keep my mouth shut because I know that people here mainly want to hear what a white person would have to say. For example, refer to what I mentioned about the debate over religion. What's interesting is how the attitudes are expressed when you break down people's posts. They're mostly using Aristotlean modes. Which checks out, because that's how persuasive argument is taught in schools. They're operating off the most conservative models of cultural institutions. They're literally buying into everything they conservative religions want you to believe about the history of their religion. They're using modern Eurocentric norms to translate concepts from entirely different cultures and time periods. They're employing categorical readings of historical processes and meaning, which is ironically a highly conservative paradigm (I mean, I admit the necessity of some degree of ontology, but people here go way overboard, while at the same time lack the grounding in theory of science required to apply ontology properly). I mentioned above that I get really intimidated whenever this community goes after one of the things that it doesn't like. That's because I know that I'm one of the things that they do like: non-white, non-Abrahamic, non-straight. I just also know that they don't actually like non-white people, even though they think they they do. What they really like is their white person's idea of what a non-white person is. They might go around criticizing Christianity and praising colonized people, but they weirdly cling to the perspectives of fundamentalist Christianity and Eurocentrism with an iron grip. This community tends to resolutely and obsessively believe in the very perspectives that it claims that it opposes.

Most people of color are the ones who want to tackle the issues with nuance. The problem is that we have to tackle the issue through the proxy of whiteness. For example, as a queer Bengali person, I often interact with queer ex-Muslims. Now, on paper, we should have a lot in common. They walked away from Islam. I built a wall between myself and the more ritualistic or devotional forms of Dharmic religion. We're both anti-Modi, anti-caste, and anti-Hindutva. We're both opposed to Islamic nationalism, but we also think that Muslims are a targeted group and that needs to stop. There's just one problem. I still hold some Advaita, Nyaya, and Sramana beliefs, though I prioritize my scientific and philosophical training (which I view my beliefs as upholding). Which means that from a dharmic perspective, I'm still practicing "Dharma". Meanwhile, from an Abrahamic perspective, my ex-Muslim friends are considered to be atheist. So despite having so much in common, we end up placed on opposing sides of the struggle, all because we have to negotiate through Western ideas of "religious" or "atheist". That's colonialism at work. So I think that we need to understand colonialism and try to work around it. I just also think that most of what white people consider anti-colonialism is actually colonialist and paternalist as hell.

My advice is this. Find a community of people who are interested in this subject at depth. Because at the end of the day, you're going to face these frustrations basically anywhere in the mainstream white LGBT community. I'm not saying don't hang out in places like this, just set your expectations low on certain things. At the end of the day, most 'woke' people in LGBT spaces are well-intentioned white kids who vastly overestimate their understanding of some very complex subjects. But I would encourage you to not shrug off the legacy of colonialism. If anything, the problems with how people talk about these issues are themselves a legacy of colonialism. But for me, the issue is less colonialism being the cause of all these problems, and more colonialism being the only gaze through which anyone ever tries to fix that problems (whether they're right-wing or 'woke').

PS: This is nitpicking, but the Mughal Empire was not the same thing as India. That's a particularly sensitive issue for anti-centre people such as myself, who question the very idea of an Indian nation. There's this weird thing with Indian history where people either interpret the Mughals as the root of all evil or the root of all Indian history. The reality is that the Mughals were only one small part of a far vaster history, and they had complex effects which were a mix of good and bad. But that itself only helps to prove your point about how we talk about history in a vastly oversimplified way when it's not about white people.

PPS: I just want to emphasize that I'm not Christian, I don't hold Christian views, and my own religious beliefs are so different from Christianity that they're really not even what you'd call "religion". I brought up Christianity as a lens through which to explore how the perspectives and worldview of this subreddit is so often at odds with the nominal ideology of the people here. If you're upset at me because you think that I'm arguing that Christianity is good, then please do me a favor and try reading through my comment one more time.