Positive Religious Orientation Deserves Support!
- Category: Faith
- Date 06-03-2005
- 437 views
A house divided against itself cannot stand, said Abraham Lincoln. To underscore the importance of unity, other instructive adages also come in handy, such as “unity is strength”, and “united we stand, divided we fall”.
The Global Network of Religions for Children (GNRC) has apparently understood the need for positive religious orientation among children and come up with an initiative that is geared at instilling the virtue of peaceful coexistence among believers of varying faiths. The co-ordinator of the GNRC initiative Mr. Mustafa Ali has pointed out that regardless of their scanty differences in beliefs, religious and faith-based organisations can work together. He added that all religions preach peace and love, which is why the GNRC, headquartered in Japan, has launched a programme that would mobilise various religious bodies towards peace building (See: Religious bodies counselled on peace initiatives, The Citizen Friday 25th February 2005, page 4).
Accordingly, the GNRC will undertake to create peace clubs, targeting four million children countrywide, to revive and inculcate a culture of peace among Tanzanian children. Spreading to every continent already, the initiative, which started in 2000, has its African Secretariat in Tanzania in recognition of the late Mwalimu Julius Kambarage Nyerere’s contribution in fighting for peace.
Unfortunately, religion is the single institution that proclaims the virtues of love, truth, unity and generally holy livelihood, but religious adherents are seemingly under obligation to undermine these very precepts. The behaviour and practices of many religious people are usually at variance with their professed ideals, but normally shaped by pride and a tendency to undermine their perceived rivals in other faiths. Thus we have growing acrimony among religions, each endeavouring to assert itself as the most genuine before God, in which case arguments and suspicion often arise and steadily degenerate into conflicts and violent clashes as has been the experience in Nigeria.
If all the basic religious tenets were to be seriously upheld and followed by believers of respective faiths as preached, there would not be the mess of religious antagonism and hostility we experience today. We have severally read and heard that a house of worship here and another one there has been destroyed; a church is burnt down in Zanzibar or a mosque is razed to the ground in Kaduna, Nigeria. It is a painful irony that religion, which sets out to unite humankind with one another and with God, is possibly the most polarising element in human experience. More than race or nationality, religion instils a sense of self-importance and prejudice and a feeling that God prefers members of one’s religious group to any others and favours their traditions and practices more than anything else.
Today, almost every individual has been accosted, or rather confronted, by a person of a religion other than his own and requested to convert to “the right religion”, “the only one that God accepts as it is founded on better principles, by the will of God”. The only religion that assures a person of God’s favour and a blissful life in the hereafter. Thus to be known as serious adherents of their faith, believers feel compelled to point out that all other faiths are second-class, if at all recognised and accepted by God. This instils a contemptuous attitude of others’ religions and a person will not hesitate to despise them.
In a majority of cases, most serious believers tend to judge people by fixed and possibly unfair standards of right and wrong, and often try to force or teach others to behave according to their set standards. Finding that other people have been brought up under a different orientation, they become resentful, sectarian, and sometimes violent against them, thereby undermining the possibility of peaceful coexistence.
To all intents and purposes, the establishment of the Global Network of Religions for Children is a superb initiative. It will foster an excellent understanding of religions as mere different faces of the same coin. It will promote respect for humanity in all their uniqueness, upbringing, beliefs and respective religious practices. It will hopefully enhance unity in diversity, which is a necessary foundation for peace and harmony in the community, and the world as a whole.
Most important of all, the GNRC is targeting to educate children about the need and importance of peace building. They have selected the most appropriate audience – the children – who are still in their formative stages, more receptive to new concepts and quite impressionable. A sustainable children’s network of this kind might ensure that as they grow up, they would have acquired positive religious perceptions and good social relations. It is a tenet of contemporary psychology that an individual’s mental health is supported by having good social networks.
By Venansio Ahabwe
Source: Peering Eye, Sunday Citizen