Dear Editor,
To any unbiased observer it would seem that religious strife has divided the entire world and had caused untold suffering and irreparable damage.
We’ve reached a point also in human affairs when violent global conflicts between people who profess different faiths threaten us all. Regardless of whether you practise a religion or not, this issue affects you, your family, your region and your country. The tensions in the world, the flashpoints we all fear, could flame up at any moment.
As we’ve become more of a global community of nations, massive world wars have largely ceased. We still witness innumerable smaller wars of liberation, regional conflicts and proxy battles, but for the most part large nations haven’t engaged in wholesale open mass warfare in almost seventy years, since the end of World War II. The world’s massive stockpile of nuclear weapons, luckily, hasn’t been used since then, either.
Of course we’ve seen several ethnic conflicts break out during the last half-century—Bosnia and Rwanda, just to name two of the worst. However, those ethnic conflicts have remained localized and, by most estimates, have diminished rather than increased over time.
Just one area of warfare has seen significant expansion during the post WWII period: religious wars. Hindu v Muslim; Muslim v Christian; Buddhist v Hindu; Jewish v Muslim, Sunni v Shi’a—all of the tectonic plates of the world’s largest religions and their various sects keep scraping up against each other and causing violent, destructive earthquakes.
These faith-based wars, which we often label terrorism or fundamentalism or religious extremism, have plagued the world for centuries, but have seen a lamentable resurgence in the 21st century.
Many analysts and experts continue to insist that these wars really aren’t about religion. They say we fight those wars over secular concerns: economics, or class, or oil, or water, or land.
The global West, it seems, with its typical separation of church and state, has no conceptual framework for a religious state, and therefore thinks of all wars that involve religious states as religious and not political.
In most ways, the world’s religious authorities bear the biggest responsibility for this sad state of affairs.
Because religious institutions have so actively encouraged violence and warfare in the past as ways to forcibly spread their teachings, defeat their enemies or take and colonise new territory, their followers increasingly believe today that violence is not only justifiable but expedient, and not only expedient but somehow approved by God.
This incredibly ugly and blasphemous assumption maligns everything true religion stands for and corrupts the entire concept of a peaceful and loving Creator.
No legitimate religion teaches violence, murder and war. No founder, messenger or prophet of any true faith ever advocated offensive warfare; instead, the original teachings of each great world faith emphasize peace, love and kindness, tolerance and respect.
Luckily in our peace-loving Guyana we do not contemplate religious wars among ourselves, not even racial ones any more!
Yours faithfully,
Rooplall Dudhnath
