Religious Diversity

Here is an blog post at Ancient Eyes For Current Time about religious diversity that I found interesting.

Th author quotes the "suffer not a witch to live" line from the Bible. That line has always bugged me since I found out that is not the true translation from the original language. I have heard that it was mistranslated, like many passages in the King James version, for political reasons.

I have thought about why some people are seemingly obessed with having everyone believe the same thing, basically refusing that that there should be religious diversity. When I've been around people who are having this type of discussion, I have felt as if they would prefer the world be filled with mindless zombies just so they can feel justified in their own beliefs.

Religious diversity helps us to grow as people - that is, as long as people are tolerant. Some of the conversations that I have learned from the most, were with people who have very different view from what I believed. After the conversations, my views changed slightly or were stregenthed by what we talked about. Now, these weren't the rowdy "this is what I believe" type conversations; They were intellegent, tolerant discussions with everyone invovled knowing there were several different viewpoints. I wish there could be more discussions like this.

Religious diversity and tolerance are about more than just conversations, though. I think that to have true diversity and tolerance, we have to knowledge about other religions and the willingness to learn about different belief systems. If we don't, it is like comparing each religion to a island, some bigger that others, that we only have ocassional connections to by old fashioned ships, which take huge amounts of time to actually get to the same place. Each island is seperated by vast bodies of water that we must learn to cross, either by faster ships or by new technology.

In other words, we need to bring the communication gap closer together. We need to be able to sit down and have intellegent conversations about issues and come to an understanding, even if we don't agree. I'm not saying that we need to change the views of others, we just need to realize that sometimes we, the people of different faiths, are not going to see eye to eye on every issue - AND THAT IS OKAY.

Here are some other takes of the issue of religious diversity:

Bringing East and West Together
Comp Musings
Lipstick Hippy