My blogging friend over at Apprentice2Jesus has drawn attention to a terrific article, The Moral Animal by Jonathan Sacks in the New York Times Opinion Pages, where Darwin and Religion are discussed.
"Still in Britain three in four people, and in America four in five, declare allegiance to a religious faith. That, in an age of science, ... is truly surprising," he writes. "It remains the most powerful community builder the world has known. Religion binds individuals into groups through habits of altruism, creating relationships of trust strong enough to defeat destructive emotions. Far from refuting religion, the Neo-Darwinists have helped us understand why it matters."...and so on...
The fact is that religion is Social Capital WRIT LARGE. And as Sacks concludes, "Religion is the best antidote to the individualism of the consumer age. The idea that society can do without it flies in the face of history and, now, evolutionary biology."
Showing posts with label Jonathan Sacks. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Jonathan Sacks. Show all posts
Saturday, 29 December 2012
Saturday, 26 November 2011
Interfaith week and media bias - again!
Did you know we have just come to the end of Interfaith week? No, I didn’t either. There is an International version, World Interfaith Harmony Week, in the first week in February, and I'd love to hear about any similar American initiatives. But for England, Wales and Northern Ireland Interfaith Week this year was November 20th to 26th, and in Scotland it will be November 27th to December 4th!
It wasn’t until I read a fairly muted piece in The Times on Friday about the Chief Rabbi Jonathan Sacks confessing to politicians and Jewish communal leaders at the Scottish Parliament that he finds Christmas carols uplifting, that I discovered, way down towards the end of the item, the fact that “leaders of all faiths” have been celebrating this week as Interfaith Week.
Why on earth hasn’t the media given it more prominence? OK I know there has been lots more going on in the world this week that has attracted the attention of the journalists; not least the attacks on their own kind by the Leveson inquiry on the behaviour of the UK media in hunting down sensitive stories and converting them into the sensational, at the expense of the victims. But why on earth didn’t I know about it from my church activities? I would have incorporated it into my intercessions I prepared for the service last Sunday had I known. And I read quite widely, listen to the news regularly, spend time researching faith issues.
Of course the media trades in bad news, not good. And interfaith initiatives are good news for society. Any interfaith activities that promote dialogue and understanding and respect between them have to be a good thing in promoting a peaceful future for us all.
Dr Rowan Williams, the Archbishop of Canterbury, said to be close to the Chief Rabbi, is quoted in The Times as saying that “One of the things we have cause to be grateful for in this country (1) is the warmth and spontaneity of relationships between leaders in the faith communities.” “Lord Sacks, as quoted in the same article, told the Jewish Telegraph: “The big challenge is to bring the news to the public that the different faith groups get along together and enjoy being part of the British culture.” Williams is further quoted as saying that such relationships are “rare” in the modern world and something to be grateful for. “In history, religious identity has sometimes been the cause of rivalry.” That seems like a masterful understatement and ingenuous comment coming from such a fine intellect. I quote from what he went on to say:
"The point is though that although we have a history that is sometimes one of conflict and rivalry, we have begun slowly but steadily to develop that much richer vision which allows us to say we help one another to be human in our difference. And because our religious identities are not just something that affects one little part of our lives but something that has to do with the most profound and definitive relationships that we have, our relationship to God, to reality, that surely is a reason for not seeing our religious belonging, our religious identity, as ever in competition with other things but rather as the context in which all our thinking, all our loving and all our hoping takes place." and I strongly recommend that his speech is read in it entirety.
Now why couldn't The Times have put across something of that fuller message? Sacks is right. Getting the news to the public will indeed be a big challenge as long as our media continue to be biased against religion in their reporting.
(1) And this extends to America. In an excellent book by Gustav Niebuhr, Beyond Tolerance: How People across America are Building Bridges Between Faiths, he describes in some considerable detail the many initiatives being taken in this respect. (See my blog for August 22nd for review).
It wasn’t until I read a fairly muted piece in The Times on Friday about the Chief Rabbi Jonathan Sacks confessing to politicians and Jewish communal leaders at the Scottish Parliament that he finds Christmas carols uplifting, that I discovered, way down towards the end of the item, the fact that “leaders of all faiths” have been celebrating this week as Interfaith Week.
Why on earth hasn’t the media given it more prominence? OK I know there has been lots more going on in the world this week that has attracted the attention of the journalists; not least the attacks on their own kind by the Leveson inquiry on the behaviour of the UK media in hunting down sensitive stories and converting them into the sensational, at the expense of the victims. But why on earth didn’t I know about it from my church activities? I would have incorporated it into my intercessions I prepared for the service last Sunday had I known. And I read quite widely, listen to the news regularly, spend time researching faith issues.
Of course the media trades in bad news, not good. And interfaith initiatives are good news for society. Any interfaith activities that promote dialogue and understanding and respect between them have to be a good thing in promoting a peaceful future for us all.
Dr Rowan Williams, the Archbishop of Canterbury, said to be close to the Chief Rabbi, is quoted in The Times as saying that “One of the things we have cause to be grateful for in this country (1) is the warmth and spontaneity of relationships between leaders in the faith communities.” “Lord Sacks, as quoted in the same article, told the Jewish Telegraph: “The big challenge is to bring the news to the public that the different faith groups get along together and enjoy being part of the British culture.” Williams is further quoted as saying that such relationships are “rare” in the modern world and something to be grateful for. “In history, religious identity has sometimes been the cause of rivalry.” That seems like a masterful understatement and ingenuous comment coming from such a fine intellect. I quote from what he went on to say:
"The point is though that although we have a history that is sometimes one of conflict and rivalry, we have begun slowly but steadily to develop that much richer vision which allows us to say we help one another to be human in our difference. And because our religious identities are not just something that affects one little part of our lives but something that has to do with the most profound and definitive relationships that we have, our relationship to God, to reality, that surely is a reason for not seeing our religious belonging, our religious identity, as ever in competition with other things but rather as the context in which all our thinking, all our loving and all our hoping takes place." and I strongly recommend that his speech is read in it entirety.
Now why couldn't The Times have put across something of that fuller message? Sacks is right. Getting the news to the public will indeed be a big challenge as long as our media continue to be biased against religion in their reporting.
(1) And this extends to America. In an excellent book by Gustav Niebuhr, Beyond Tolerance: How People across America are Building Bridges Between Faiths, he describes in some considerable detail the many initiatives being taken in this respect. (See my blog for August 22nd for review).
Wednesday, 24 August 2011
A Shared Responsibility, a Shared Sense of Belonging
I write today (24th August) on my Ripples of Hope blog about our flawed economy, inspired by an article at Digital Journal, Op-Ed: The West v Islam? This same article led me to the website of the international Quilliam Foundation “challenging extremism, promoting pluralism, inspiring change”)
The foundation is named after Shaikh William Henry Abdullah Quilliam (1856-1932) who founded one of the first British mosques, in Liverpool, in 1889.
We are told on Quilliam’s website that Quilliam
“was a native Englishman, a solicitor, from Liverpool, England. He, and many of his contemporaries, embraced Islam voluntarily and established Britain’s first mosque in Liverpool, now a national heritage site. This was the first native Muslim community, dedicated to serving fellow Brits on the English mainland. Shaikh Quilliam was one of the first people to grapple with the challenges posed by inter-cultural exchanges which preceded the age of mass globalisation. As such, we have much to learn from the example set by him and his small Muslim community in Liverpool.”
I also learnt that in that same year, 1889, the Shah Jahan Mosque was built at Woking by Dr Gottleib Wilhelm Leitner, a Jewish convert, and that The Holy Qur’an was first translated into English by the Christian convert Marmaduke Pickthall (1875–1936).
I suspect few people know – I didn’t – that Islam was first imported into Britain by white converts as long ago as the 19th Century.
For Americans reading this blog, and by way of comparison, Muslims first entered the United States from the Ottoman Empire, and from parts of South Asia from the 1880s to 1914. It is most likely that Albanian Muslims in Biddeford, Maine founded the first American mosque in 1915. A Muslim cemetery still exists there.
But I digress!
Quilliam claims to be “the world’s first counter-extremism think tank set up to address the unique challenges of citizenship, identity and belonging in a globalised world. Quilliam stands for religious freedom, equality, human rights and democracy.”
“Challenging extremism is the duty of all responsible members of society,” it writes. “Not least because cultural insularity and extremism are products of the failures of wider society to foster a shared sense of belonging and to advance liberal democratic values. With Islamist extremism in particular… a more self-critical approach must be adopted by Muslims. Westophobic ideological influences and social insularity needs to be challenged within Muslim communities by Muslims themselves whilst simultaneously, an active drive towards creating an inclusive civic identity must be pursued by all members of society.” (my emphases)
So what is this shared sense of belonging?
The Renaissance author and Anglican priest John Donne famously wrote in 1624:
No man is an island, entire of itself; every man is a piece of the continent, a part of the main. If a clod be washed away by the sea, Europe is the less, as well as if a promontory were, as well as if a manor of thy friend's or of thine own were. Any man's death diminishes me, because I am involved in mankind; and therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls; it tolls for thee.(1)
The Apostle Paul, writing in his first epistle to the Corinthians, on human worth, likened the worldwide body of Christians with the human body. All parts of the body are essential for the complete welfare of the whole. In the same way we all need each other and the loss of any part weakens us all: there should be no discord between us. He taught his followers that the members of the church should ‘have the same care for one another. If one member suffers, all suffer together; if one member is honoured, all rejoice together.’(2) The ‘body’ in this biblical context is translated from the Greek Soma, related to Sozo meaning ‘to heal, preserve, be made whole.’ We are not whole: we are wounded or spiritually impoverished if we are not a part of the greater body of faith in our community. We all need to feel that connectedness, that relationship. We need to find unity within the wide diversity of all our individual gifts. We all need each other and we all are special in the eyes of God.
Followers of the Baha’i faith see Earth as one country of which we are all citizens.(3) One of their guiding principles is that ‘the oneness of humanity is the fundamental spiritual and social truth shaping our age.’
Whatever our faith, or none, we can be guided by these truths.
This – as the Quilliam Foundation reminds us, is our responsibility.
This then had me musing a little more about our personal and corporate responsibilities.
Viktor Frankl once wrote that ‘Being human means being conscious and being responsible.’ He was writing about the very core of our being, our human conscience, and our personal integrity.
The state of being responsible is to be ‘liable to be called to account,’ or to render satisfaction, or to be answerable to someone for something. In his book To Heal a Fractured World The Chief Rabbi Jonathan Sacks writes at length on the ethics of our responsibilities. His theme is that ‘Life is God’s call to responsibility.’ While written from a Jewish perspective, his message is equally relevant to those of all other faiths or none. The Jewish ethics of responsibility can be summed up very simply. If someone is in any kind of need, help him. And this, he says, is the best answer he knows to the meaning of life, expressed in the Hebrew word simhah meaning the happiness we make by sharing. It is akin to the joy or ‘blessedness’ of the Christian who hungers and thirsts for justice and righteousness.
The twenty-first century philosopher and social commentator Aldous Huxley also recognized the essential role and responsibility of the individual in determining the events of the world. In a shift away from his early preoccupation with the mistakes of institution and state, he came to believe in later life that ‘the most overlooked cure for social problems is actually the improvement of the individual citizen, and that cultures are only expressions of the collective consciousness of their people.’(D. Sawyer, Aldous Huxley: A Biography, New York: The Crossroad Publishing Company, 2002 p. 95, cited at http://www.itp.edu/about/aldous_huxley.php
Perhaps one of the greatest enemies of responsible behavior is to be found in the remoteness that often exists between cause and effect. It is so much easier not to have a conscience about our behavior where the consequences of our actions are not directly experienced. Someone speaking on the radio the other day about the horrors of child prostitution said we should all be screaming to have something done about it. But we carry on our daily lives as if nothing is wrong in the wider world.
We need to remind ourselves that inaction can be as irresponsible as inappropriate action. It can be important that we should take a stand. It is believed to have been said by Albert Einstein that‘The world is a dangerous place, not because of those who do evil, but because of those who look on and do nothing.’
But one often has to be courageous to speak up about something that is important to us. It is not always easy to try to paddle against the tide. It is much easier to go with the flow. As Voltaire once remarked, ‘No snowflake in an avalanche ever feels responsible.’
Quilliam seeks to challenge what we think, and the way we think. It aims to generate creative, informed and inclusive discussions to counter the ideological underpinnings of terrorism, whilst simultaneously providing evidence-based recommendations to governments for related policy measures. I think it deserves our attention.
I suspect that much religious intolerance is born out of ignorance, with no real justification other than the fear that ignorance nurtures. Part of our responsibility demands that we recognize our prejudices and fears born out of ignorance and that as far as possible we keep ourselves informed of the important issues of the day, so that we are better equipped to play our part in discovering our shared sense of belonging and healing our wounded world.
Further resource:
http://www.masud.co.uk/ One of the Web's Leading and Original Resources for Traditional Islam since 1996
www.khudipakistan.com
Lots of relevant media articles at http://www.quilliamfoundation.org/media.html
1. John Donne seventeenth century English poet died 1631. Famous words of prose taken from the final lines of his 1624 Meditation 17, from Devotions Upon Emergent Occasions.
2. Holy Bible, Revised Standard Version, 1 Corinthians 12. 25,26.
3. From Baha’u’llah’s Revelation, as he enjoins his followers to develop a sense of world citizenship and a commitment to stewardship of the earth. From Faith in Conservation, 2003, p. 72.
The foundation is named after Shaikh William Henry Abdullah Quilliam (1856-1932) who founded one of the first British mosques, in Liverpool, in 1889.
We are told on Quilliam’s website that Quilliam
“was a native Englishman, a solicitor, from Liverpool, England. He, and many of his contemporaries, embraced Islam voluntarily and established Britain’s first mosque in Liverpool, now a national heritage site. This was the first native Muslim community, dedicated to serving fellow Brits on the English mainland. Shaikh Quilliam was one of the first people to grapple with the challenges posed by inter-cultural exchanges which preceded the age of mass globalisation. As such, we have much to learn from the example set by him and his small Muslim community in Liverpool.”
I also learnt that in that same year, 1889, the Shah Jahan Mosque was built at Woking by Dr Gottleib Wilhelm Leitner, a Jewish convert, and that The Holy Qur’an was first translated into English by the Christian convert Marmaduke Pickthall (1875–1936).
I suspect few people know – I didn’t – that Islam was first imported into Britain by white converts as long ago as the 19th Century.
For Americans reading this blog, and by way of comparison, Muslims first entered the United States from the Ottoman Empire, and from parts of South Asia from the 1880s to 1914. It is most likely that Albanian Muslims in Biddeford, Maine founded the first American mosque in 1915. A Muslim cemetery still exists there.
But I digress!
Quilliam claims to be “the world’s first counter-extremism think tank set up to address the unique challenges of citizenship, identity and belonging in a globalised world. Quilliam stands for religious freedom, equality, human rights and democracy.”
“Challenging extremism is the duty of all responsible members of society,” it writes. “Not least because cultural insularity and extremism are products of the failures of wider society to foster a shared sense of belonging and to advance liberal democratic values. With Islamist extremism in particular… a more self-critical approach must be adopted by Muslims. Westophobic ideological influences and social insularity needs to be challenged within Muslim communities by Muslims themselves whilst simultaneously, an active drive towards creating an inclusive civic identity must be pursued by all members of society.” (my emphases)
So what is this shared sense of belonging?
The Renaissance author and Anglican priest John Donne famously wrote in 1624:
No man is an island, entire of itself; every man is a piece of the continent, a part of the main. If a clod be washed away by the sea, Europe is the less, as well as if a promontory were, as well as if a manor of thy friend's or of thine own were. Any man's death diminishes me, because I am involved in mankind; and therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls; it tolls for thee.(1)
The Apostle Paul, writing in his first epistle to the Corinthians, on human worth, likened the worldwide body of Christians with the human body. All parts of the body are essential for the complete welfare of the whole. In the same way we all need each other and the loss of any part weakens us all: there should be no discord between us. He taught his followers that the members of the church should ‘have the same care for one another. If one member suffers, all suffer together; if one member is honoured, all rejoice together.’(2) The ‘body’ in this biblical context is translated from the Greek Soma, related to Sozo meaning ‘to heal, preserve, be made whole.’ We are not whole: we are wounded or spiritually impoverished if we are not a part of the greater body of faith in our community. We all need to feel that connectedness, that relationship. We need to find unity within the wide diversity of all our individual gifts. We all need each other and we all are special in the eyes of God.
Followers of the Baha’i faith see Earth as one country of which we are all citizens.(3) One of their guiding principles is that ‘the oneness of humanity is the fundamental spiritual and social truth shaping our age.’
Whatever our faith, or none, we can be guided by these truths.
This – as the Quilliam Foundation reminds us, is our responsibility.
This then had me musing a little more about our personal and corporate responsibilities.
Viktor Frankl once wrote that ‘Being human means being conscious and being responsible.’ He was writing about the very core of our being, our human conscience, and our personal integrity.
The state of being responsible is to be ‘liable to be called to account,’ or to render satisfaction, or to be answerable to someone for something. In his book To Heal a Fractured World The Chief Rabbi Jonathan Sacks writes at length on the ethics of our responsibilities. His theme is that ‘Life is God’s call to responsibility.’ While written from a Jewish perspective, his message is equally relevant to those of all other faiths or none. The Jewish ethics of responsibility can be summed up very simply. If someone is in any kind of need, help him. And this, he says, is the best answer he knows to the meaning of life, expressed in the Hebrew word simhah meaning the happiness we make by sharing. It is akin to the joy or ‘blessedness’ of the Christian who hungers and thirsts for justice and righteousness.
The twenty-first century philosopher and social commentator Aldous Huxley also recognized the essential role and responsibility of the individual in determining the events of the world. In a shift away from his early preoccupation with the mistakes of institution and state, he came to believe in later life that ‘the most overlooked cure for social problems is actually the improvement of the individual citizen, and that cultures are only expressions of the collective consciousness of their people.’(D. Sawyer, Aldous Huxley: A Biography, New York: The Crossroad Publishing Company, 2002 p. 95, cited at http://www.itp.edu/about/aldous_huxley.php
Perhaps one of the greatest enemies of responsible behavior is to be found in the remoteness that often exists between cause and effect. It is so much easier not to have a conscience about our behavior where the consequences of our actions are not directly experienced. Someone speaking on the radio the other day about the horrors of child prostitution said we should all be screaming to have something done about it. But we carry on our daily lives as if nothing is wrong in the wider world.
We need to remind ourselves that inaction can be as irresponsible as inappropriate action. It can be important that we should take a stand. It is believed to have been said by Albert Einstein that‘The world is a dangerous place, not because of those who do evil, but because of those who look on and do nothing.’
But one often has to be courageous to speak up about something that is important to us. It is not always easy to try to paddle against the tide. It is much easier to go with the flow. As Voltaire once remarked, ‘No snowflake in an avalanche ever feels responsible.’
Quilliam seeks to challenge what we think, and the way we think. It aims to generate creative, informed and inclusive discussions to counter the ideological underpinnings of terrorism, whilst simultaneously providing evidence-based recommendations to governments for related policy measures. I think it deserves our attention.
I suspect that much religious intolerance is born out of ignorance, with no real justification other than the fear that ignorance nurtures. Part of our responsibility demands that we recognize our prejudices and fears born out of ignorance and that as far as possible we keep ourselves informed of the important issues of the day, so that we are better equipped to play our part in discovering our shared sense of belonging and healing our wounded world.
Further resource:
http://www.masud.co.uk/ One of the Web's Leading and Original Resources for Traditional Islam since 1996
www.khudipakistan.com
Lots of relevant media articles at http://www.quilliamfoundation.org/media.html
1. John Donne seventeenth century English poet died 1631. Famous words of prose taken from the final lines of his 1624 Meditation 17, from Devotions Upon Emergent Occasions.
2. Holy Bible, Revised Standard Version, 1 Corinthians 12. 25,26.
3. From Baha’u’llah’s Revelation, as he enjoins his followers to develop a sense of world citizenship and a commitment to stewardship of the earth. From Faith in Conservation, 2003, p. 72.
Friday, 19 August 2011
The Golden Rule
The world is truly a rich tapestry of many different faiths, religions and spiritual ideas. The rules and customs of ancestral religions still give meaning, purpose and spiritual nourishment to most of the seven billion people on the Earth today. Something like 84% of the world’s population have a faith or religion, often with deeply held convictions, and of the remaining 16% one half claim to be theistic even if not religious. And surely spiritual nourishment is necessary for human flourishing, as recognised by the many who do not feel the need to join any organised religion on a regular basis but still pursue spiritual practices of one sort or another.
But the secular materialism of the West seems to hold the moral high ground, has the cultural initiative. And religion sometimes, indeed often, comes in for disdain. Worse still, there is a huge amount of intolerance or even persecution for religious beliefs in some countries, even in this 21st Century. For just one example read what is really going on in Zimbabwe to Christians at the moment, (courtesy of Nick Baines' blog) a subject picked up so fleetingly in the News media lately that you would have missed it in a blink.
But why is this? Why can we not all respect each others' beliefs and ideas? Why can we not live and let live? Why do some atheists so passionately argue for the abolition of religion, as if that were possible? It is certainly not desirable. Yes it is true that religions have not always been forces for good in the world. But I think it was the Chief Rabbi Jonathan Sacks who pointed out once that humans have always been able to find excuses for violence and war without religion. And the religions historian Karen Armstrong has also reminded us that wars are mostly about greed, envy, ambition, land ownership, even if they are often cloaked in religious rhetoric to give them “respectability.
Why throw out religion? Religions are a huge force for good in the world. They are behind much of the humanitarian aid made available to those suffering across the globe from disasters however caused, and they have between them some amazing and enviable global networks, both interfaith and intra-faith, all working for the good of humanity.
And religion also provides spiritual nourishment and support at the all important individual and local level. UK Conservative Prime Minister David Cameron has been derided in some quarters for his ideas of a Big Society. Some profess to be unable to understand what he means. But we have a Big Society writ large in our own church and community, everyone looking out for each other, extending hands of friendship and support to those in need, enjoying fun together in community events, and generally feeling a strong sense of belonging in what can otherwise seem a confusing and harsh world out there.
There is also so much in common between many of the world’s faiths. For a start they share what is called “The Golden Rule,” expressed in its positive format as “do to others as you would wish others to do to you.” For Jews this is expressed as: “What is hurtful to yourself, do not to your fellow man.” One of the Ten Commandments is after all “Love your neighbour as yourself,” and Jesus reminds his followers that this is the second great commandment (Matthew ch 22. v. 39). In Jainism they say: “In happiness and suffering, in joy and grief, we should regard all creatures as we regard our own self.” Hinduism expresses it thus: “Do not to others, which if done to thee, would cause thee pain.” And so on. Just imagine if everyone, religious or not, actually lived out that maxim. Surely at an individual level we do not want others to hate us, to hurt us, be rude to us, kill us, treat us with disdain, etc., etc? A good video to watch on this is Karen Armstrong’s TED talk, Let's Revive the Golden Rule.
But we should also celebrate our differences, and learn from them. We can learn and enjoy so much about other faiths and cultures if we open our minds. And here let’s extend this beyond religious differences, to differences of culture, sexuality, politics. We all need each other, whatever our beliefs, and we should use our multiple resources for good, not for violation and destruction.
But the secular materialism of the West seems to hold the moral high ground, has the cultural initiative. And religion sometimes, indeed often, comes in for disdain. Worse still, there is a huge amount of intolerance or even persecution for religious beliefs in some countries, even in this 21st Century. For just one example read what is really going on in Zimbabwe to Christians at the moment, (courtesy of Nick Baines' blog) a subject picked up so fleetingly in the News media lately that you would have missed it in a blink.
But why is this? Why can we not all respect each others' beliefs and ideas? Why can we not live and let live? Why do some atheists so passionately argue for the abolition of religion, as if that were possible? It is certainly not desirable. Yes it is true that religions have not always been forces for good in the world. But I think it was the Chief Rabbi Jonathan Sacks who pointed out once that humans have always been able to find excuses for violence and war without religion. And the religions historian Karen Armstrong has also reminded us that wars are mostly about greed, envy, ambition, land ownership, even if they are often cloaked in religious rhetoric to give them “respectability.
Why throw out religion? Religions are a huge force for good in the world. They are behind much of the humanitarian aid made available to those suffering across the globe from disasters however caused, and they have between them some amazing and enviable global networks, both interfaith and intra-faith, all working for the good of humanity.
And religion also provides spiritual nourishment and support at the all important individual and local level. UK Conservative Prime Minister David Cameron has been derided in some quarters for his ideas of a Big Society. Some profess to be unable to understand what he means. But we have a Big Society writ large in our own church and community, everyone looking out for each other, extending hands of friendship and support to those in need, enjoying fun together in community events, and generally feeling a strong sense of belonging in what can otherwise seem a confusing and harsh world out there.
There is also so much in common between many of the world’s faiths. For a start they share what is called “The Golden Rule,” expressed in its positive format as “do to others as you would wish others to do to you.” For Jews this is expressed as: “What is hurtful to yourself, do not to your fellow man.” One of the Ten Commandments is after all “Love your neighbour as yourself,” and Jesus reminds his followers that this is the second great commandment (Matthew ch 22. v. 39). In Jainism they say: “In happiness and suffering, in joy and grief, we should regard all creatures as we regard our own self.” Hinduism expresses it thus: “Do not to others, which if done to thee, would cause thee pain.” And so on. Just imagine if everyone, religious or not, actually lived out that maxim. Surely at an individual level we do not want others to hate us, to hurt us, be rude to us, kill us, treat us with disdain, etc., etc? A good video to watch on this is Karen Armstrong’s TED talk, Let's Revive the Golden Rule.
But we should also celebrate our differences, and learn from them. We can learn and enjoy so much about other faiths and cultures if we open our minds. And here let’s extend this beyond religious differences, to differences of culture, sexuality, politics. We all need each other, whatever our beliefs, and we should use our multiple resources for good, not for violation and destruction.
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