Pluralism(15)

I have sent my next question to B, but he is very busy these days, so I will try to talk about pluralism every on and off to keep the continuity of my posts till I receive his new emails. I will start to talk about different attitudes existing on this issue from the next post, but now I want to write about an issue that I think is important to take care of and should be made clear in the start, since I feel that there are some mix-ups in this issue and especially I felt it in the first comment I got from Jazz when I asked B what was the immediate result of this-his pluralism- way of looking ? Jazz commented:

The immediate result is that we can respect all religions for trying to attain the goal of being 'good' person. For adhering to morality.

What has been taken for granted here is that not acknowledging other religions or ways or claims or laws as equally worthy of following, necessarily brings with it a certain type of undesirable behavior towards the adherent of them. This notion being taken as granted, is not only wrong, but also in my view dangerous. It is dangerous because of two direct outcomes. First, it reduces us to a passive position of relativistic claim; accepting everything without trying to analyze its importance, value, practicality, usefulness and possible flaws as true for its adherents. In this way it deprives us from the power of criticizing and reasoning. Second, very insidiously it justifies in our mind those who disagree with others, to engage in every kind of unhealthy way of confronting them. Moral issue of treating others shoudn’t be mixed up with the scientific work of evaluating different religious ways. The question of diversity of religions is not how an advocate of one religion should approach an advocate of another religion, but rather how that advocate should approach to what the other person advocates. The first one is merely a matter of morality, but the second one requires that we consider the claims and laws of different religions and try to understand their significance for the people of our time and other things about them. This passive position, renounces any possibility that there may be some religious truths that may be true for everybody, or can be evaluated by everybody for some unanimous results. If people hold wrong beliefs in our view, it doesn’t let us to mistreat them, in the same way that agreeing with other’s beliefs doesn’t justify any favoritism.

(posted by Farid)
Posted:Sunday, July 27, 2003 |