Guardians of the Sacred Fires

[qatarperegrine]

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.

Comments

Esperanto

[(Anonymous)]

"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

[qatar.livejournal.com]

Since the link has been taken down, here is the article in its entirety.

Reflection: "Guardians of the Sacred Fires"
The challenge of surviving in a world of many religions
- Kent Moorehead

When Mark Twain made the caustic remark that man “is the only animal with The True Religion—several of them,” he inadvertently set the context for the encounter of the great world religions. People love the faiths that have given their lives meaning and hope, and if we want to take inclusive religion seriously, it is imperative that we consider these faiths. We are living in a new world order, and most of us in our lifetime will encounter Buddhists, Jews, Muslims, Hindus, Christians, and adherents to other vital but lesser known religions. It is difficult to read a newspaper or watch television news without hearing about followers of these religions. Walter Muelder once said that “anyone writing a descriptive story [about our age] would have to talk about the tremendous impact of religion upon contemporary society.” Of course, it goes without saying that the impact of religion can be positive, as well as destructive and divisive. How can these diverse traditions live together?

Douglas V. Steere, of the Society of Friends, in his 1971 Pendle Hill pamphlet titled Mutual Irradiation, suggested four possible postures the world religions can assume as they relate to each other. First, each religion can actively seek to triumph over the others, or at least take some measure of satisfaction if the others decline in strength. This kind of proselytizing posture usually involves some form of comparing the highest ideals of one’s own religion with the worst practices of another faith and then assuming that there is some Divine mandate to defeat the inferior religion. For instance, it has been said that Christianity is a religion of peace and Islam is a religion of violence. In reality, both Christianity and Islam have talked about the importance of peace but also have supported wars for centuries—and not just wars between nations with rival religions. Christian nations fought two bloody world wars in the 20th century, and Iran and Iraq, the only two Islamic nations with Shiite majorities, fought a protracted and horrible war against each other. Apparently, large numbers of Christians in this country believe that our attack and invasion of Iraq, in which it has been conservatively estimated that there have been 50,000 civilian causalities, is not only justified but is the will of God. In this regard, the great evangelistic task of the church is to Christianize itself: to liberate Christianity from its captivity to our “praise the Lord and pass the ammunition” culture and challenge it to follow the way of Jesus. In like manner, Islam and Judaism have their own set of serious internal problems. It is possible for religions to self-righteously assume that they have, because of their superiority, the right to try to defeat the others, but this assumption is the height of arrogance and the antithesis of inclusiveness.

A second posture, says Steere, is to pursue a relationship of coexistence, which either makes no attempt to challenge or influence, or just ignores the other. Steere tells of a party at which the father of the girl who was having a birthday was doing tricks and acting silly. As the children were leaving, the father said to one of the children, “I bet you think I am a silly old man,” to which the child responded, “I never think of you.” Some report that when they played hide-and-seek as children, there was something worse than being found, and that was not being sought after! To say to someone, “I am not interested in your life journey, your dreams, your attempt to build a better world,” and to disregard what may be the most important elements in that person’s life, just may be the ultimate insult. It either says, “I don’t care about you and your faith,” or “I am so insecure in my own life or faith or so self-centered that I don’t want to talk about such things, and therefore I never think of you.” This is no longer possible—no longer a viable option for the religions of the world as they relate to each other.

[continued]