balance?

I met a person in the park the other day, who couldn't have been more sweet. We got to talking, and i said that i'd been having a rough go of it, because my emotional walls are too low - i lack proper protection from all the fear, aggression, and loneliness that permeate this world.
He didn't quite know what to make of my declaration. As inoffensively as possible, he disagreed with my premise. He opined that being emotionally open cannot be bad, because positivity and negativity exist in equal amounts in the world.
Equal amounts.
It's a good thing i wasn't sipping a beverage, else my spit-take might have alienated him entirely. We chatted amiably a bit longer.
Was i tempted to offer a counter-argument? Something like...
"Let me take a stab at dissuading you from your position. Just off the top of my head...in the richest country in the world, a majority of people live under some form of economic deprivation, with one of every five children in outright poverty. Nine of every ten rapes go unreported. 16,000 children starve to death on this planet every day. One of every hundred deaths is self-murder. All ocean life is projected to be dead within a few decades. We keep over two million citizens locked in cages...which is nothing compared to the hundreds of billions of other animals, thinking, feeling creatures, we keep inside cages their entire lives, living and dying in conditions so horrific that the average person would fall down and puke if they came face to face with the reality. Now please tell me where you find a positivity/negativity balance."
I didn't say that.
But for the rest of the day, one of the tracks in my head puzzled over how anyone could look at the world, and conclude what this person had concluded.
Twelve hours later, in the middle of the night, it hit me.
He believes in god.
How do i know?
Faith in a higher power leads to belief in moral absolutes. When one believes in moral absolutes, life becomes about the struggle between good and evil, and for that struggle to make sense, those forces must be more or less balanced.
Ergo, well-intentioned and reasonably intelligent people find themselves concluding that worldly positivity and negativity are equal. And just like that, they've adopted a position which absolutely blinds them to the dire urgency of how bad things are. They've embraced an overall view of life which can take any horror, any crisis, and say "this is part of a plan".
But nothing is more needed at this point in history, than clear big picture thinking.
Religion is not benign.
Forget crusades, jihads, proselytizing, and persecution. Forget the assault against science, and intolerance of tolerance.
Even non-religious, universalist faith in "god" is not benign.
It doesn't matter how pleasant or caring it might make someone on the surface, if it prevents them from seeing the world AS IT IS. Humynity's ills are cataclysmic, and the window of opportunity to do anything about that is shrinking so fast, we simply don't have the luxury of keeping our heads in the sand. Worldly positivity is getting its ass kicked by a stunningly wide margin, and if we prevent ourselves from SEEING that, we will never change what we are doing to others, and to ourselves.
Nor is this only (only??) about the big picture. His blinders prevent him from perceiving or feeling the misery in every person he passes on the street. The only ones not consciously or subconsciously hiding their pain, are the "insane". He's young, and likely doesn't understand that nobody is more skilled at rationalization and denial than the young...
But i didn't say any of that to him.
I'm saying it to you.
Anybody hear me?