Religion and Peace: The Open Door

Once you, as a committed and invested interfaith activist have a clear grasp of the core dimensions of interfaith, a sound command of the systematic and step wise process needed to succeed, and have identified clearly the horizons you hope to impact through your interfaith achievements, we are ready to step into the content of the matter, a high wire act in all ways.

We enter a world of passions, commitments, and attachments far more powerful even than life and love itself. Religious people easily sacrifice their lives and all that is dear for what they hold true and of God. We even find religion in our current world today in which people publicly murder their own children in its name! Let us be sure we enter a world where niceness is not the recipe for achievement. We enter a world where being intelligent, or worse clever is not the recipe for achievement. We enter a hair trigger world, where there are 1000s of ways to fail, and some of these ways are microscopic, elusive, and oft inscrutable.

This blog, and this book now embarks into the phase of “content.” The first entry in this phase looks into questions about Truth, Commitment, and Pluralism, both in their own right, and in their interplay.

The “Truth” question must eventually examine two distinct elements, which act in equally powerful ways. The first is actual, honest to goodness, Truth with a capital T, namely what in fact actually is. The second is what any given religious believes to be true.

Being bound heart and soul to the second exerts just as powerful a grip on a committed soul as the first. An interfaith activist MUST know clearly that once we start, we enter into a world of people who are ready to sacrifice everything for Truth, real or imagined.