The University of Auckland has announced a Multifaith Conference to be held 8-9 September 2008, themed on “Uni-Diversity: The challenges of Change”.
“…[R]eligious diversity confronts us with many challenges. The place of religion itself in the public arena, the accommodation of various religious practices in public institutions such as schools and universities, or the real fear of religious conflict are just some of the questions that have no ready answers and require serious consideration.”
Speakers include Paul Weller (Derby, UK), Toh Swee-Hin (Griffith University, Aus), Douglas Pratt (Waikato, NZ), Javed Khan (FIANZ, NZ), Sylvia Bell (Human Rights Commission, NZ), and Paul Morris (Victoria Uni, NZ).
May 30th, 2008
By Dave
A new book by Bruce Chilton, “Abraham’s Curse: The roots of violence in our religions” was reviewed recently in the Jerusalem Post.
Chilton focuses on the story of the binding of Isaac / Ishmael as the archetypal story of martyrdom, but also finds numerous correctives from sacred texts in each tradition that clearly indicate that God does not want human beings to sacrifice ourselves or our children.
Chilton’s bottom line is that “the time is now for the Abrahamic religions to find a safe way down from Mount Moriah”, ie we need to overcome our violent histories and learn to live with each other.
Abraham’s Curse is available at Amazon.
May 30th, 2008
By Dave
Here’s a copy of the talk that I gave during Speakers’ Corner at the recent Jewish Christian Muslim Association conference.
The time has come to move beyond the language of tolerance to forge meaningful relationships with each other, each others’ religions, and with the greater society. To tolerate is to merely put up with, but we all desire to be understood and accepted.
In the developed world, religious and ethnic groups have reached a state of tolerance, but so much more is possible. Although not without challenges, achieving a state of tolerance has been relatively easy, in that hasn’t required deep engagement between religious communities and has been intentionally low risk. We can enjoy talking about our commonalities over a somosa, falafel, and hot cross bun, but the really crunchy issues lay well beyond this hail-fellow-well-met superficial interaction.
Beyond tolerance, we can build trust, respect, friendship, and ultimately love. But trust is a huge ask from groups whose adherents are literally killing each other at the moment in different parts of the world, and have been doing so for centuries. So how can we break the trust barrier, and achieve love and acceptance?
Unfortunately, there is no quick fix or magic solution for building trust. It will take a long time, working hard together, but is possible to achieve if we have the will. I believe there are three strategies we can use to move beyond tolerance: Learn, Engage and Transform; and these can be applied to ourselves, our own communities, and greater society.
To start the journey, we must learn about and fully understand ourselves, our whakapapa or ancestry, and what makes ourselves tick. Knowing ourselves individually, we can move onto learning about our own communities, their rich histories, the wisdom of our sages, our communal vision for what it means to be a good person living a good life. If we don’t have a strong and secure sense and knowledge of our own identity and traditions, we can feel threatened by other religions; conversely with a strong sense of identity we are enriched by different perspectives, and we can learn about others and our greater society with confidence.
But learning isn’t enough. We must engage with ourselves, involved in a constant inner conversation about right versus wrong, good versus bad, helpful versus harmful to the common wellbeing, sacred versus profane. If our society is the sum of the decisions made by its members, then we are personally responsible for each decision we make as we go through life, and we can only do this if we are self-aware and self-engaged.
Before we can move on to engage with other groups and greater society, we must first build trust and respect within our own communities by engaging fully within them. People within our own communities judge us by our intentions, our willingness work hard and take on unpopular tasks, our ability to get along with others and get the job done. With the trust and respect of our communal peers, we can go on to representing ourselves and our communities to other groups and society as a whole.
A great way to start is to develop personal one-to-one relationships with people of different beliefs, getting to know them as individuals, and how their belief system affects the way they live. Trust develops from personal friendship. However it’s much harder to build trust between groups. But why is this?
Each of our religions has elements within based on what can only be described as prejudice.
This prejudice takes the form of supremacy (“my religion is better than your religion”, “you can only find God by traveling our path”), exclusion (“we treat others differently than we do ourselves”, “you’re not welcome in our club”), repression (controlling the thoughts and behaviour of our members), misogyny (limiting power in the religion on the basis of gender), and individual or collective violence. Would you be eager to sit down and forge a deep relationship with a group you suspected of harbouring bigots? Of course not, but if we are honest with ourselves, all of our religions tolerate such bigotry, to a greater or lesser extent, within our own ranks.
If we want to move beyond tolerance, we need to sort out our own houses first, by transforming ourselves and our own communities. We cannot tolerate intolerance or let our religions be used to enable, justify, or support supremacy, exclusion, repression, misogyny or violence. We must revolt against and change those structures in our own religions which promote or abide intolerance. This intolerance may have been acceptable many centuries ago when our religions were being formed, but it has no place in the 21st century where we must live together in a shrinking world. It’s very hard to build trust when our coreligionists are doing terrible things in our religion’s name.
Religions that can make this transformation will go forward to earn the trust of others, respect, friendship and love, confident that the nice person you met at the interfaith conference holds the same commitment to peace as their colleagues both locally and worldwide.
Those religions that can’t make the transformation will be merely tolerated, and only as long as they are useful in some way to the society in which they operate.
It will be a long, hard road to achieve this transformation, and we may not finish it in our own lifetimes. In the words of the Talmud (Pirkey Avot 2.15): “You are not required to complete the task, yet you are not free to withdraw from it.”
Let’s work together in our own communities and throughout society, being diligent and trustworthy, supporting each other to bring about positive change, and ensure that our religions are used as instruments of peace.
May 30th, 2008
Tony Blair is about to launch his new Faith Foundation. In an interview with the Guardian, he says that the foundation will bring together six faiths – Christianity, Judaism, Islam, Buddhism, Hinduism and Sikhism, and that the new foundation would encourage practical work by religious groups to help tackle poverty and disease.
Although he is a committed Christian, Blair distanced himself from religion for fear of being dismissed as a nutter, although he famously stated as he decided to join the US in the Iraq war that “If you believe in God, [judgment] is made by God as well.”
No doubt the new foundation is part of his attempt to right past wrongs.
May 30th, 2008
By Dave
On my way back from the Jewish Christian Muslim Association’s annual conference, I received an email from Rev Dick Pruiksma, the General Secretary of the International Council of Christians and Jews. This email was sent out all of the the ICCJ’s constituent organisations, including the Wellington Council of Christians and Jews, of which I am the secretary.
The letter states that at the 2007 Annual General Meeting in Sydney, the ICCJ’s constitution was altered with a new statement of purpose of the organisation:
a) To support and promote the endeavours of its national member organisations in the international field and to contribute to solve problems in interfaith, interracial and international relations, taking into account the religious and moral principles that form the basis of the Jewish and Christian traditions.
b) to undertake and promote activities in the field of Christian-Jewish as well as Christian-Jewish-Muslim cooperation that combat anti-Semitism, racism, discrimination, aggressive nationalism, theological and other prejudices, and their consequences
c) To foster religious liberty
Rev Pruiksma’s letter includes a questionnaire on the relevance of trilateral dialogue to member organisations, any existing initiatives being taken by member organisations, and how ICCJ can help enable trilateral dialogue.
This is a very exciting development. I’ve often wondered why we have both a Council of Christians and Jews, a Council of Christians and Muslims, and no Council of Muslims and Jews. In the past it has seemed like a missed opportunity, duplicated effort, and Yet Another Set Of Meetings. There are ad-hoc trilateral discussions happening in a number of places, and it would be good to get some academic oomph behind them as well as respectability at the top levels of the constituent religions.
There trilateral approach is not without risk though.
One nice thing about bilateral dialogue is that there is no chance of a two-on-one beat-up at an organisational level. If one party ever feels marginalised in the organisation, then the organisation will collapse.
Another risk is loss of focus. There are plenty of unresolved issues between each of the religions that need to be worked through bilaterally, in which the presence of a third party could be distinctly unhelpful. I would hope that the organisation would make room for these discussions to continue, as well as open up a space for direct Jewish-Muslim discussions.
A third risk is the baggage carried by the old organisation. Can the existing Christian and Jewish members of the various CCJ organisations really deal with Muslims with the same openness as they’ve dealt with each other? It’s going to be a very big ask for some people, and unless all three view each other with a sense of absolute equality, it will be difficult to make real progress.
It’s a bold move, and not before time. Sure, there are risks, but we should be looking at ways of mitigating and managing the risks, rather than throwing the baby out with the bathwater.
Good work, ICCJ!
May 30th, 2008