Religious Tolerance?

It's very hard for me to come up with a new post, I mean one other than my ramblings of my everyday boring life or Magic related. A post with more substance, not much but slightly more, that sets mind thinking or at least makes you go "Hmm" even for a while. I'm always bad with words, verbal and literal, always been. I guess what I'm getting on with is that I'm trying to write a piece about religious tolerance and religious harmony and what I think about it but I kept getting stuck in weird places, awkward sentences and what not. Me trying to assemble words into sentences into arguments into a post often leads to a hilarious result. So there it goes, I said it and thus, it's a subtle disclaimer for my previous and future post for you to take notice, not that anyone read them anyway but hey, better late than sorry.

So the issue that I want to talk about here are about religious tolerance and religious harmony. Maybe I've been staying in Singapore for too long but I keep hearing the same thing again and again that Singapore is a great melting pot of people from different races, cultures and religions and that religious harmony is very important to keep the country together and yada yada yada. It's all good and great but I kept asking myself, what is this religious harmony that they keep yaking about? Of course the basic understanding of it would be people from different faiths living together and everybody is happy. But how is that possible? How do you tolerate people from other religion? And that's when I asked the next question, what is religious tolerance?

So let's go through the motion, shall we? Let's say you, Mr. D. Vout, is a practitioner of a particular religion A and your next door neighbour, Mr. N. Fidel, is a follower of another religion B. Now, how can you interact with this particular person when you know that he's worshiping the wrong god (because of course your god is the one true god, duh)? Being a good neighbour, of course you can't stand idle and see this otherwise upstanding person be led and worship a false god, you're responsible to lead him to the light. Really seriously, how is this religious tolerance works? If you faithfully believe in whatever you believe in and you know that the other person, in this case Mr. Fidel, believes in other things, how can you not scoff at it, although probably inwardly and not outwardly, and think that he's wrong? Does knowing more about his religion will make it better? Will it make you think that maybe his religion is not that wrong after all? The thing is there's no grey area here, it's either here or there. If you think his religion is right then yours is wrong, vice versa, it's as simple as that, and then maybe you want to think about changing your religion.

But some religions do preach the same thing, don't they? Love thy neighbour, do unto others what you wish others do unto you and all that stuff. Yeah, but does that make those religions the same religion? Guess not. Of course you can find similarities between two religions but does it make it easier for someone to accept another religion? Does it make the other religion more true and hence, acceptable? Let's go back to Mr. Vout and Mr. Fidel. Let's say religion A say do not kill and the same goes for religion B. In this aspect, both religions preach the same thing, but it does not make both of them the one and the same because there are other aspects in which they differ (let's just assume that), maybe how their pray or the name of their gods. For Mr. Vout, does the fact that religion B also say do not kill make it any truer? The same goes for Mr. Fidel. If you are a follower of a religion A, then you must think that religion A is true.

So what is this religious tolerance? My guess is that it's ignorance, or at least feinting ignorance. You know Mr. Fidel is wrong but you choose to ignore that fact and resume a normal cordial social relationship with him. I’m not saying this sort of ignorance is bad; on the contrary in fact, ignorance is bliss, after all. From what I’ve seen, people seem to simply don’t care about other people’s religion. Social reliationships of people from different faiths are then mostly based on other factors, such as common interest or common personality. Is religion ever a unifying factor here? Very hard to say as often is just a non-factor.

So what's the purpose of visiting other religion's place of worship or studying other religion? Will that make the relationship better? Again, will it make truer for you? Is it completely useless then? I don't think it's completely useless. At least you know what you are ignoring and not get caught in false knowledge and prejudices. But what good does it do knowing all that if you are going to ignore it in the first place? Isn't it better not knowing? I think it's because you don't ignore everything but you select the things you wish to ignore. You throw away the things that is not in tune with your own sets of believes and you acknowledge those which do.

Of course all this assumptions would only work between people of considerable religious faith and I think that includes even atheist and agnostics. I think we can call those religions in their own light, they just don’t believe in god.

The point after all that mumbo jumbo is that the feeling of superiority that one has regarding their religions compared to other religion is, dare I say it, inevitable (at least for most). It’s there, it might not be shown but the latency is there. And then the question that comes after that is that if religion plays a big part in our community then how all this religious harmony works? Is it religious “selective” ignorance then that unites people from different religions? Silly questions, I know, but someone got to ask, right?