qatarperegrine | Guardians of the Sacred Fires

I really like this article on religious pluralism in the most recent Zion's Herald. It's actually the postscript of a book called The Inn at the End of the World (Reflections on an Inclusive Faith) by a retired United Methodist minister, the Rev. Dr. Kent Moorehead.

Guardians of the Sacred Fires: The challenge of surviving in a world of many religions

My favorite paragraph:

The third posture [towards religious pluralism] is to seek to take the universals of each faith, the things we all have in common, and merge them into a world faith. This would be a new synthetic form of spiritual Esperanto. Esperanto was that attempt to create a new world language, which never really worked. People love their own language. An Italian who wants to speak to his beloved wants to be able to say amore. Most of us who love Shakespeare prefer to hear it in English rather than Esperanto. The universal ideals of the great religions, such as peace, are important, but people are attracted to a faith by the particulars. Take Moses and the Prophets out of Judaism, Jesus out of Christianity, Buddha out of Buddhism, and Muhammed out of Islam, and you have a kind of amalgamated religion that sounds a little too much like spiritual stew. It would be dull, dull, dull. Behind this idea of amalgamated religion is often the idea that all religions are really the same—that we’re all trying to go to the same place, just taking different paths. Can you imagine a young woman who has just fallen in love, saying "all lovers are basically the same," or someone else saying that Gandhi, Susan B. Anthony, and Albert Schweitzer are "pretty much like anyone else?" The same is true for the great religions of the world. They are not the same. They have different views of God, history, evil, and morality. It is the distinctive elements of each religion that make them interesting and vital. Leave these out and we have lost too much.

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"Esperanto's purpose is not to replace any other language, but to supplement them: Esperanto would be used as a neutral language when speaking with someone who doesn't know one's own language. The use of Esperanto would also protect minority languages, which would have a better chance of survival than in a world dominated by a few powerful languages."

http://www.esperanto.net

http://www.2-2.se

Good point.

This is somewhat off-topic, but I think then that the best analogy for Esperanto in the western attitude towards religion is Secularism. It's seen as a default, least-common-denominator worldview that diverse people can buy into, while still maintaining their allegiance to their religion of choice.

Living in Qatar has made me realize that I am more of a secularist than I ever imagined. :-)

But Esperanto isn't a neutral language - it's very very strongly romance-language biased, and as it was created before language study was much of a science, it isn't even as regular as it could be. It's not a natural language but it doesn't have any of the benefits of non-natural languages...

Don't get me started on the fact that it doesn't protect minority languages, as there's no model of sociolinguistics that would indicate any benefits to those languages with fewer native speakers.

Does that Secularism analogy still work? :-)

Yes, it does. Secularism isn't a neutral worldview, it's very very strongly European-worldview biased. :-)

Guardians of the Sacred Fires

Esperanto

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