Do I personally believe in a multi-religious society? I do. So what? Do I personally believe anyone cares? I don’t. It does not matter at all if I or anyone else believes in a multi-religious society because the time for decisions is over. If there’s ever been one. We do live in a multi-religious society as a matter of fact. And unless we really take the separation of mankind into different theocracies into consideration there is nothing we can do about it.
Yes, we can bury our heads in the sand given the the various problems we face in multi-religious and multicultural societies. We can surrender to violence, crime, intolerance, discrimination and hatred. We can blame the concept of diversity for our own bigotry and lack of understanding.
And then we can lean back and watch the world go to the dogs and if anyone is left to ask we can complacently declare that we told them so.
Or we can throw ideologies and ideals overboard and face the situation with pragmatism. The way things look today the question is not: Do we believe in a multi-religious society. The question is: What can we do to make our multi-religious society more harmonic and peaceful?
And then we can find solutions instead of problems. We can fight violence and hatred. We can see that we have already got that far from Thirty Years’ War, crusades and inquisition. From hatred and mistrust we have come to a form of tolerance. And there is no reason why we should not move on to living together in harmony.
We have to accept that multiculturalism and diversity is a good concept even if it is hard to admit that the only problem it causes exists in our heads. For anyone with a strong faith the thought of not only tolerating other religions but regarding them as true may feel strange at first sight but we have to try again and again. Because this is the greatest challenge we face nowadays: Not to fight each other but to fight the walls of prejudice and intolerance in our own heads. If we fail there is indeed no reason to believe in multiculturalism. If we fail there is no hope that we can ever overcome division and war.
© Lea Hartwich, 2009
