Religious pluralism: Religious wars and religious tolerance

Journal of Religion in Europe, 2011

Th e term 'tolerance' has fallen on tough times. People who prefer intolerance, policies of 'zero tolerance,' or claim not to tolerate the intolerant or the intolerable are only partly responsible. Th ey share culpability with those who call for moving Beyond Tolerance (as Gustav Niebuhr and others have titled several recent books) to deeper and fuller attitudes of acceptance, affi rmation, respect, and celebration of all myriad, manner, and variety of diversity. Yet some religious and nonreligious people balk at what they see as indiscriminate approbation of ideas, activities, or worship they deem false or improper. It may be diffi cult, if not impossible, to celebrate features of faiths or ideologies that perceptibly contradict or oppose one's own. When communities have experienced decades, centuries, or millennia of discord, ambivalent or tolerant coexistence could be "as good as it gets," at least for a time. Where affi rmation is impracticable, toleration and coexistence for adherents of diff ering or confl icting religions and ideologies should be considered indispensable in a spiritually diverse world. Jacob Neusner, Bruce Chilton, and other contributors address such dissonances in Religious Tolerance in World Religions by inspecting political, scriptural, historical, theological, and ritual resources for tolerance (and to a lesser degree, intolerance) in ancient Greece, Rome, and Israel; classical and contemporary Judaism, Christian ity, Mormonism, Islam, Buddhism, and Hinduism. Neusner and Chilton defi ne tolerance as the capacity to live alongside diff erent religious traditions, including possibilities for nonbelievers to be "accorded an honorable position within the social order" (p. vii). Th ey preface by acknowledging that American, British, and Canadian expressions of religious tolerance owe a special debt to Christianity. Religious Tolerance in World Religions collates sixteen essays and an "Ancient Sources" index. It continues Neusner and Chilton's longtime collaboration in related compendiums such as Jewish-Christian Debates (Fortress, 2000), Altruism in

Vorobjova, Marina. Religious Tolerance as the Basic Component of Inter-Religious Dialogue, 2004

The problem of religious tolerance is of supreme importance in the contemporary world. Just as, a few centuries ago, many wars were provoked by religious motifs, so today clashes on religious grounds provoke military conflicts that have long overgrown the walls of churches and mosques and keep growing in spite of the sacred traditions of the religions themselves. "Orientation to love" fails to work, and the "neighbor" becomes an enemy if he does not confess the same religion. Where shall we search for the reason behind religious hostility? What is the history of intolerance? Who was the first to throw the stone that shook the foundations of peaceful coexistence of particular families and whole states? We propose to turn to the following themes: 1. World religions and relations between them (on the question of Christian­ Judeo­Islamic dialogue) 2. Relations inside world religions (on the example of Christian confessions) 3. Interrelations between world religions and new religious movements.

The Heythrop Journal, 2020

Many believe that a peaceful, tolerant and respectful coexistence among religions is not compatible with the conviction that only one of them is true. I argue that this ‘incompatibility problem’ (IP) is grounded in a ‘naturalistic assumption’ (NA), that is, the assumption that every subject, including religion, should be treated without taking into account that a super-natural being may exist and reveal to us an unexpected way to deal with our experience. I then argue that in matters of religion, NA is untenable and that its very opposite, which I call ‘super-naturalistic assumption’ (SA), should be adopted. My thesis is that, once SA is adopted, IP can be dismissed and that it is plausible to maintain that a peaceful, tolerant and respectful coexistence among religions is compatible with the conviction that only one of them is true.

Synopsis The recent attacks on churches in Indonesia may spark renewed concern that religious differences are inevitably contentious if not leading outright to violence. However, history suggests that harmonious coexistence is the norm.

Ahimsa Nonvi Olence, 2005

Rhetoric & Public Affairs, 2000

This is an excerpt from a draft version of my book A God of Our Invention: How Religion Shaped the Western World (Apocryphile Press, 2023). I've extracted just a few sections here so as to present some of my ideas on how the idea of God has driven war, and how, even when God is supposedly not involved, other ideologies replace him. The key to reducing war, I submit, lies only partly in removing God; the true solution requires minimizing all ideologies. While I cite sources and scholarly works, the book this note is extracted from is intended for a general audience, not an academic one. Comments welcome, especially on whether I've accurately reported the historical details.

The Plurality of Religions and the Global Peace, in: DİNİ ARAŞTIRMALAR KÜRESEL BARIŞ, SEMPOZYUM, t. 2, Konya 2015, pp. 537-552. In the article " The Plurality of Religions and the Global Peace " the author is pointing out the difficulties that may arise when we accept inclusivism. Inclusiv-ism, which is now the most common view on religions, is difficult to accept from the point of view of the universal monotheism as it seems to undermine the justice of revealing God and equality of all people before him. Inclusivism seems also to compromise ethical values as it enhances a sense of superiority of one religion over the other. On the other hand agnostic religious pluralism is also rejected as the one that assumes almost total irrationality of religious people. The author is arguing the religious pluralism is the only consequence that can be drawn from the idea of God's justice. Referring to the pointillist technique of painting the author is arguing that the best way to solve difficulties of inclusivism and agnostic religious pluralism would be to adopt a stance that can be called a religious pluralism of supernatural dots. This pluralism assumes religions are man-made and reflect a specific cultural environment they arose in but it also affirms that on each of them, as if on a canvas, God has painted his dots, dots that have a supernatural meaning and are a source of God's grace. These dots account for a sense of the authentic sacred that can experienced by religious people. Because of God's justice they are in sufficient numbers everywhere and, therefore, do not allow for an adherent of any religion to feel superior or inferior. God paints his supernatural dots on different places on the canvases of religions responding to the needs of the cultural setting and realizing his divine reason. The religious pluralism of supernatural dots seems to be a good intellectual basis for the peace in the world full of religions that nowadays are all too often in conflict. Exclusivism, inclusivism and religious pluralism I want to start out with a well-known threefold classification: exclusiv-ism, inclusivism, and religious pluralism. Each of these represents a particular view regarding the nature of the relationship between truth and religions. The exclusivists think their own particular religion to be the only true religion, as the inclusivists hold they possess the whole truth and others can have only a piece of it, and finally the religious pluralists maintain that followers of all diversity religions have the same access to truth. We are well aware that there are really very few exclusivists nowadays in the world.

Religion, Intolerance and Conflict: a Scientific and Conceptual Investigation, edited by Steve Clarke, Russell Powell and Julian Savulescu, Oxford University Press, 2013

Religion, peace and toleration: Can we learn with history?, 2022

Final report with integrated conclusions about religion, peace and public dialogue of the European H2020 project RETOPEA. For more info on the project see www.retopea.eu