Talk is Cheap

I’m up to Chapter 7 of the Q’uran, but I haven’t done the “hot or not” exercise for a while. Probably because the hot-not score is currently tied at 5-5 and I don’t want to do anything more blasphemous to upset the balance. Partly also because I don’t want to make a further mockery of my inter-faith work – propagating co-existence but secretly disparaging a certain religion because of its effect on my own personal life. Still, I need something to get me through the book so perhaps I’ll just fast forward to the parts that talks about non-believers and inter-faith relations.

I sometimes wonder whether all these interfaith dialogues will ever make any difference. A lot of people can preach co-existence and spend hours in conversations, but I think that’s because their lives have never been touched personally by religious conflict.

Talk is cheap. It is hard to tell the Buddhist man who lost his daughter to her Muslim in-laws and whose relations with her remains estranged that “all religions are equal”. Also, as a country, the current generation have not been tested. I used to think that all religions can co-exist too, but that was before the vehement objections to my own inter-faith relationship. Now I wonder if its all wishful thinking.

A Catholic Father had once described to me that each religion as a treasure. If all religions are the same, then we don’t need religion. The thing is that each religion has irreconcilable differences, and that is what makes them priceless – because it offers different pathways to God. The man giving a talk on Hinduism yesterday reiterated the same point. He believes that humans are in a dark box, and God is outside in the light. Light streams in from outside to the sides of the box, casting rays into the box. The problem is that each man believes that the one stream of light that he sees is the only way out to the outside, when in fact there exists many other ways, had he bothered to look around. I thought it was a nice alternative to the over-exposed Blind Men and the Elephant story.

Will we ever evolve to the day that we are able to accept that all religions, or even a non-religious way of life, are equally valid?