Pope cautions against blurring lines of religious differences

By Francis X. Rocca

VATICAN CITY — Pope Benedict XVI praised collaboration with other faiths in pursuit of common social goals but cautioned against dialogue that could lead to blurring of religious differences.

Yes of course—all the religions came from the same God to the same human race but at different times of history, so of course we should not blur the lines of when in history they each came!  Would you want to blur the lines between third grade and sixth grade? Thank you for reminding us of this difference!

Posted by Shastri at 2:36 pm

http://www.religionnews.com/index.php?/rnspremiumtext/comments/pope_cautions_against_blurring_lines_of_religious_differences/

Love in the Age of [Overt] Racism

Imagine you were in love with someone from another race. Now imagine that you were not permitted to marry that person because the laws of your land, the United States in this case, did not allow it. Mildred Jeter and Thomas Loving lived in Virginia and in 1958 when they wanted to marry, there was a state law on the books prohibiting miscegenation:

“If any white person intermarry with a colored person, or any colored person intermarry with a white person, he shall be guilty of a felony.”

Mildred and Thomas went to Washington D.C. to get married and returned home. In the middle of the night they were arrested and their one-year sentence was suspended pending their agreeing to leave Virginia and not return for 25 years. In his decision, the judge wrote:

“Almighty God … did not intend for the races to mix”

The aptly-named Lovings appealed the decision and the case eventually reached the US Supreme Court where all miscegenation state laws were declared null and void. Thomas died in a car crash in the late-seventies and Mildred died this past Sunday but their legacy lives on.

I’m reminded of the the story of Louis Gregory, a prominent African-American Baha’i who married Louisa Mathew, a British-born, Cambridge-educated Bahá’í in 1912. Louis spent his life lecturing on the Bahá’í principle of the equality of the races. He gave up his law and real estate practice in the pursuit of racial unity. When he was allowed to he would travel with his wife but in those days it was often illegal for Louis and Louisa to travel together so he often went alone.

Today the idea of racial equality is not a generally argued against-not publicly anyway. But to claim that racism does not still infect American society, and many others around the world, is to accept a failure which over time threatens the very values this country was founded upon:

“It is evident that both Black and White Americans in large numbers are feeling deeply disappointed and frustrated by what each group perceives to be a failure of the efforts in recent decades at effecting progress in the relations between the races. To rationalize this failure, both have been reacting by retreating to the more familiar ground of racial separation. As the problems with crime and drug addiction mount, the tendency is to use the seeming intractability of these problems as a measure of the failure of years of struggle on the part of both to overcome the barriers of centuries. Formidable as is the challenge yet to be met, can it fairly said that no significant progress has taken place since the days of the sit-ins at lunch counters across the South?”

- The Vision of Race Unity: America’s Most Challenging Issue

I am moved by the courage of both the Loving’s and the Gregory’s. May we draw inspiration from their example and work together towards the day when “[t]he diversity in the human family [will be] the cause of love and harmony, as it is in music where many different notes blend together in the making of a perfect chord.”

The Wizard from the album “Fur And Gold” by Bat For Lashes

Neanderthal man speaks after 30,000 years

If you ever wondered if the human race has made progress in 30,000 years or not, try listening to the sound of Neanderthal man that has just been reconstructed:

http://edition.cnn.com/2008/TECH/science/04/16/neanderthal.sound/index.html

Its interesting what a factor “speech” and “language” plays in social progress.  It fascinates me that the scriptures of the Bahai Faith mention three specific “signs” for the maturity of the human race, and one of these is that all the people in the world will be able to communicate with each other using the same language (that is everyone would still learn their “mother tongue”, but we would also learn a language that was common to everyone on the planet — either one of the existing languages to be agreed upon, or a new one).  I saw an entire country change by applying this principle — I grew up in Singapore which, a few decades ago, had different races of people speaking 4 different languages.  The government then introduced into all the school systems a policy of teaching children English as a common language for everyone in the country, as well as mandatory education in another of the 3 languages spoken (usually the “mother tongue” of the child).  Anyway, no need to comment on the progress Singapore has made in the past few decades   I’m sure being able to understand each other was one among many factors but surely an important one.

Now we can only hope that whatever common language the whole human race  may eventually adopt is not as frog sounding as the Neanderthals

The link between belief and behavior (Case Study: global warming)

CO2 is the exhaling breath of the global economy. Changing this will require an unprecedented and united global effort. Which, in turn, will require a higher level of global consciousness. This is the inevitable direction we’re heading, and we should be privileged that our generation has the opportunity to achieve it.

That’s my best summary of the message in Al Gore’s new slideshow. The question of how belief and behavior are linked is a central one for this blog, and we’ll have more to stay on it, and look forward to your comments, in the coming posts. For now, here’s Al:

So how do we go about achieving a new level of global consciousness? In Gore’s 1992 book, he points out various philosophies and Faith movements that could inspire us in this direction, including the Baha’i Faith:

One of the newest of the great universalist religions, Baha’i, founded in 1863 in Persia by Mirza Husayn Ali, warns us not only to properly regard the relationship between humankind and nature but also the one between civilization and the environment. Perhaps because its guiding visions were formed during the period of accelerating industrialism, Baha’i seems to dwell on the spiritual implications of the great transformation to which it bore fresh witness:

“We cannot segregate the human heart from the environment outside us and say that once one of these is reformed everything will be improved. Man is organic with the world. His inner life molds the environment and is itself deeply affected by it. The one acts upon the other and every abiding change in the life of man is the result of these mutual reactions.”

And, again, from the Baha’i sacred writings comes this:“Civilization, so often vaunted by the learned exponents of arts and sciences will, if allowed to overleap the bounds of moderation, bring great evil upon men.”

What do you see as the role of religion in addressing climate change or other global issues?