On October 17, 1979, Mother Teresa of Calcutta in India received the Nobel Peace Prize “for the work done in the fight to overcome poverty and misery that also constitute a threat to peace.” If she had been her now, would she have tried to overcome the terror that fuels religious hostilities?
She stated in her acceptance speech for the award that “I feel that the greatest destroyer of peace today is abortion, because it is a direct war, a direct murder – direct murder of the mother herself – because if a mother can kill to his own son -what remains for me is to kill you and you kill me- there is nothing between {http://nobelprize.org/peace/laureates/1979/teresa-lecture.html}
If the laureate were still alive now, she would have said that the biggest obstacle to peace today is terror, because terrorists plan to eliminate the person they fear or hate. In reality, they are so intimate with death that they do not seem to love life. They don’t operate by the rules and are willing, if necessary, to die to deliver their explosives to their target and they don’t care who dies with them. In fact, there seems to be no physical protection against these terrorists who are plaguing our world.
With the assumption that the Western world is Christian, while most of the nations supposedly forced to adopt a democratic government are Islamic or belong to the Eastern or even traditional religions, then religion becomes the world’s main problem.
In August this year, US President Bush used terms such as “Islamic fascists” for both Hezbollah and suspected bomb plotters being held in London. The same week, during a press conference at his ranch in Taxes, he said that “terrorists are trying to spread their jihadist message – a message I call — Islamic radicalism, Islamic fascism.”
Those statements offended a large majority of moderate Muslims. In their defense, it may be true that there is nothing Islamic about the fascism of the terrorists.
It is true that the UN, which is currently the supreme world body, does not favor or oppress any religion. In fact, the UN and the US liberated Muslims from Christian oppression in Yugoslavia in the 1990s. In fact, the US has put in its Bill of Rights, Amendment I, that “congress shall not enact any law respecting the establishment of a religion or prohibiting the free exercise thereof.”
Hmm…
Rotich/Teresa/2
This law that does not respect or prohibit religion is becoming the best recipe for peace in a world plagued by the debacle of religious hostilities.
Barely a decade ago, in December 1998, a brawl on Poso, one of the Indonesian islands, led to months of religious violence in which hundreds of people died. Poso is located in the center of Sulawesi, the fourth largest island in Indonesia that has 80% Muslim and 17% Christian residents.
In July this year, Hezbollah’s attack on Israel sparked hostilities in Lebanon, resulting in hundreds of deaths and injuries on both sides. The infrastructure suffered extensive damage and several people were internally displaced.
On October 9 this year, North Korea bravely conducted its first nuclear test in defiance of the will of the international community. He provocatively displayed his possession of weapons of mass destruction.
Laureate Teresa’s solution to the current problem that is stealing peace would be ecumenism. She once said that “God is one and he is God to all, so it is important that all be seen as equals before God. I have always said that we should help a Hindu to become a better Hindu, a Muslim to become a better Muslim, a Catholic to become a better Catholic. She offered her work in the charity’s missionary organization as an example of the benefit of ecumenism. She said that “we have 475 souls among us, 30 families are Catholic, and the rest are all Hindus, Muslims, Sikhs, all different religions. But they all come to our prayers. {[http://www.newadvent.org/cathen/1513a.htm]}
After a series of serious wars and rumors of wars that have carried religious connotations, world leaders should now think about gifting the chaotic and insecure world with a peace based on a world with one creed.
This automatically demands that all the religions of the world borrow a leaf from the Hindus, whose supreme being has already said that in whatever way men approach me, so I receive them, because even the paths that men from all sides take they are mine. {Gita IV, 11}. This has made Hindus peacefully coexist with other religions by not pushing for more members. Lobbying is, among others, what provokes religious hostilities.
For Christians this is not a surprise but a fulfillment of the scripture that says to work while it is still day because night will come (Amos 8:11-12). When the night comes, the believers of those scriptures must agree to put down their tools and accept the dictates of their fulfillment. Pope Benedict, who recently inadvertently offended Muslims in his speech in Germany, should realize that it is time to embrace post-Vatican II Catholicism. This Catholicism asserts in part that Islam, Hinduism, Buddhism, Judaism, and any other religion that seeks to help humans overcome their sense of alienation from ultimate realities are all valid pathways to salvation.
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