Conversations: Interfaith Dialogue

Helena
It is a truism that devout religious people tend to view questions of public policy and global conflict in terms of their affiliation with their religion.

Sappho
That is exactly why it seems profoundly unlikely that we will heal the divisions in our world through inter-faith dialogue. Devout Muslims are as convinced as Christians are that their religion is perfect and that any deviation leads directly to hell.

Galene
However, it should be noted that representatives of the major religions occasionally meet and agree that there should be peace on earth, or that compassion is the common thread that unites all the world’s faiths.

Sappho
True, but there is no escaping the fact that a person’s religious beliefs uniquely determine what he thinks peace is good for, as well as what he means by a term like “compassion.” For instance, there are millions—maybe hundreds of millions—of Muslims who would be willing to die before they would allow a Christian, Jewish or Hindu version of compassion to gain a foothold on the Arabian Peninsula.

Helena
How can interfaith dialogue, even at the highest level, reconcile worldviews that are fundamentally incompatible and, in principle, immune to revision? The truth is, it really matters what billions of human beings believe and why they believe it.

(Based on: Harris. S. 2006. Letter To A Christian Nation p. 27-28)

On the Right to be Wrong

“Freedom is the right to be wrong, not the right to do wrong.”

– John Diefenbaker

North Korea and the Status Quo

It could be argued that North Korea qualifies as a failed state. The regime is so unstable and insecure it requires a totalitarian grip on every citizen in order to survive. The government aspires to control every aspect of life to ensure the perpetuation of its power. It mainly achieves this by indoctrinating its citizens from birth and maintaining an atmosphere of fear and constant battle against invisible foreign enemies.

In reality, the allegedly perfect regime is ludicrously incompetent and inconsistent. Supposedly, there is housing for everyone, but no citizen can choose where to live. Supposedly, there is schooling for everyone, but no one can choose what they want to learn. Supposedly, there is universal healthcare, but there are no medicines to cure patients. On the one hand, individual initiative of any kind is stamped out, on the other hand, the government cannot provide basic necessities for its citizens, most importantly, food. On top of that, dissenters, nonconformists, critics and others who are considered traitors to the regime are regularly imprisoned, tortured or executed, often together with their entire family. (The list of known human rights violations is too long to go into any further.)

This begs the question, with such a tenuous grip on power, how does the North Korean regime manage to survive?

Jus Ad Bellum

The Just War Theory also known as the Jus ad Bellum is a dubious theory on the basis of which, through the ages, nations have sought to legally and morally justify the taking up of arms. The foundation for the Just War Theory was laid by Augustine in the 4th century. About eight centuries later, during the high middle ages, Augustine’s reflections were codified into the distinct criteria by Thomas Aquinas. These criteria remain the basis of the Just War Theory as it is known today. They are:

• Just Authority: Also known as Competent Authority, Just Authority states that a just war must be initiated by a political authority within a political system that allows distinctions of justice.
• Just Cause: In order to produce a justification, an authority must be able to show that some wrong has been committed by one nation for which war is thought to be the proper response.

“I strongly believe that there is a Christian doctrine of just war.”
– Ron Paul

• Just Intention: A warring state is prevented from going beyond the boundaries of its justification by acting according to its justified intentions.
• Last Resort: War is morally permissible only when there is no other course of action open. This means that the nation considering war has exhausted all potential solutions, including political and diplomatic.

– Courtesy of oregonstate.edu

“Violence and arms can never resolve the problems of men.”
– Pope John Paul II

On a Nice House

“What is the good of having a nice house without a decent planet to put it on?”

– Henry David Thoreau

Building a Global Civilization

‘It is important to realize that the distinction between science and religion is not a matter of excluding our ethical intuitions and spiritual experiences from our conversation about the world; it is a matter of our being honest about what we can reasonably conclude on their basis. There are good reasons to believe that people like Jesus and the Buddha weren’t talking nonsense when they spoke about our capacity as human beings to transform our lives in rare and beautiful ways. But any genuine exploration of ethics or the contemplative life demands the same standards of reasonableness and self-criticism that animate all intellectual discourse. As a biological phenomenon, religion is the product of cognitive processes that have deep roots in our evolutionary past. Some researchers have speculated that religion itself may have played an important role in getting large groups of prehistoric humans to socially cohere. If this is true, we can say that religion has served an important purpose. This does not suggest, however, that it serves an important purpose now. […] That religion may have served some necessary function for us in the past does not preclude the possibility that it is now the greatest impediment to our building a global civilization.’

– Harris. S. 2006. Letter To A Christian Nation p. 29

Competing Religions and Peace

‘The idea that Islam is a “peaceful religion hijacked by extremists” is a fantasy, and it is now a particularly dangerous fantasy for Muslims to indulge. It is not at all clear how we should proceed in our dialogue with the Muslim world, but deluding ourselves with euphemisms is not the answer. It is now a truism in foreign policy circles that real reform in the Muslim world cannot be imposed from the outside. But it is important to recognize why this is so—it is so because most Muslims are utterly deranged by their religious faith. Muslims tend to view questions of public policy and global conflict in terms of their affiliation with Islam. And Muslims who don’t view the world in these terms risk being branded as apostates and killed by other Muslims.

But how can we ever hope to reason with the Muslim world if we are not reasonable ourselves? It accomplishes nothing to merely declare that “we all worship the same God.” We do not all worship the same God, and nothing attests to this fact more eloquently than our history of religious bloodshed. Within Islam, the Shi’a and the Sunni can’t even agree to worship the same God in the same way, and over this they have been killing one another for centuries.

It seems profoundly unlikely that we will heal the divisions in our world through inter-faith dialogue. Devout Muslims are as convinced as you are that their religion is perfect and that any deviation leads directly to hell. It is easy, of course, for the representatives of the major religions to occasionally meet and agree that there should be peace on earth, or that compassion is the common thread that unites all the world’s faiths. But there is no escaping the fact that a person’s religious beliefs uniquely determine what he thinks peace is good for, as well as what he means by a term like “compassion.” There are millions—maybe hundreds of millions—of Muslims who would be willing to die before they would allow your version of compassion to gain a foothold on the Arabian Peninsula. How can interfaith dialogue, even at the highest level, reconcile worldviews that are fundamentally incompatible and, in principle, immune to revision? The truth is, it really matters what billions of human beings believe and why they believe it.’

– Harris. S. 2006. Letter To A Christian Nation p. 27-28

Human Well-being, Facts and the Arab-Israeli Conflict

The Arab-Israeli conflict is an ongoing and often violent religious clash over the land of Palestine. Both sides claim historical religious rights to the land and use those claims to justify fighting. This fight over the land officially began in 1948 after the UN gave the Jewish population Israel, and the Arabs felt that it was their land that was being given away.

Unfortunately, most of the commentaries regarding this ongoing conflict are heavily politicised and, worse still, often steeped in prejudices fuelled by religious hatred (and to complicate things, this hatred is not only emanating from the apparent religions involved).

If we are to have a real discussion about how we can further the cause of building a more peaceful society in the Palestine region, it behoves us to, firstly, condemn all violence without prejudice; and secondly, state merely facts which relate to human well-being (insofar as this can be determined).

Over a period of nearly 70 years,

• 72% of the West Bank has been declared ‘Israeli state land’ and has been confiscated from Arab Palestinians who have occupied the region since the time of the British occupation and the Ottoman occupation before that. These confiscations, whatever the policy behind them, have never been compensated. This has, understandably, caused some friction.
• 400,000 Israelis have settled in the expropriated land, often destroying the olive groves which were the source of employment and income of the local Arab population. This has, again, understandably, caused some friction.
• Most of these Israeli settlers have access to their part of a 250 mile new highway network which, as opposed to the Arab Palestinians, provides free movement to the Israeli population and the well-equipped army which guards it.
• As a result, at present, most West Bank Palestinians are confined to 200 disconnected enclaves. Today, this is, arguably, the most common source of friction between the two parties.[1]

“What I discovered was that a West Bank Palestinian could not work, build, study, purchase land, grow produce, start a business, take a walk at night, visit his family in Gaza, enter Israel or travel abroad without a permit from us and that we had imprisoned about one third of the entire Palestinian population.” – Uri Savir (Israel’s chief negotiator at Oslo from 1993 to 1996)

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[1] Israeli Committee Against House Demolitions (2003).