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 | Religion as a Global Phenomenon for the New Millennium | | 01.02.1999 | | Annual Meeting 1999 | A universal global ethic to counter fundamentalism and materialism in the new millennium
When a participant from the floor pointed out that 90% of those attending the session on religion for the new millennium are women, moderator Dominic Peccoud, Adviser for Socio-Religious Affairs at the International Labour Office in Geneva, joked that the men at Davos were too busy doing business to worry about the meaning of life.
Fundamentalism is a worldwide threat, suggested Peccoud. So how do we counter it? The key is to change the view that salvation depends on playing by certain religious rules: everyone is saved. This is not to slip into syncretism, where we buy what we want from the supermarket of world belief, but to recognize that each religion has its own faith while remaining open to other faiths.
"Islam defends the concept of plurality and diverse humanity," said Dalil Boubakeur, Rector of the Institut Musulman de la Mosquée de Paris, France. It is an eminently spiritualist and tolerant religion, despite what the media would have us believe. Globalization threatens to reduce humans to consumers. The Internet and urbanization are undermining cultural identities. And bioengineering calls into question human rights and dignity. We need to rediscover spirituality and inter-religious dialogue to counter these developments and to promote peace, tolerance and a sense of conscience in the next century.
"Religion should become experimental - it should become experiential," said K.L. Seshagiri Rao, Chief Editor of the Encyclopedia of Hinduism, and Professor Emeritus, University of South Carolina, USA. "Mere science cannot give us the meaning of life - empirical truth is not the whole truth," he argued, pointing to the 4.5 million Americans who meditate. He called for an end to divisive dogma and a reawakening of inclusive spirituality.
Christianity faces major changes but that is nothing new, explained Keith Ward, Regius Professor of Divinity at Christ Church, University of Oxford. From its early days as a Jewish messianic sect, Christianity changed into an imperialistic theology based in Constantinople, then a Roman Catholic vision of "Christendom" to be imposed worldwide. The Reformation introduced (unintentionally) democracy, literacy and criticism, leading to a key question on the eve of the third millennium: "Is Jesus Christ the only saviour?" Ward does not believe so, but argued that "salvation is given by God to all humanity on condition that they turn from egoism to God."
"The world is fed up with dogmatic religion but is starving for spirituality," said Denys Teundroup, Honorary President of the European Buddhist Union, France. He contrasted the "tradition of the Buddha" with the fundamentalism often generated by monotheism. But he pointed to the common passions and thoughts which all humans share and proposed as his golden rule: "don't do to others what you wouldn't like done to you." He suggested that the "cognitive spirituality", which Buddhists practice and that Greeks also recognize, reflects the need to know the true nature of one's mind, but within the framework of spiritual contemplation. He mentioned a new Internet initiative to promote a culture of world peace, based on altruism and universal responsibility.
In response to a question from the floor asking whether one global ethic underlies all religions, Ward pointed out that Teundroup's "golden rule" is very similar to Jesus's call to worship God and to love your neighbour as yourself - if, as Ward suggests, you understand "God" to signify "what is ultimately true and beautiful and compassionate". Rupert Sheldrake, Research Fellow at the Institute of Noetic Sciences, USA, sees modern secular materialism as the main threat to spirituality and suggested that resisting this common enemy could be the cause around which all world religions unite. Peccoud concluded that different religions are like the many faces of a single diamond, refracting into many colours the one unique and invisible light of God. |
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