Moving forward, we should do our best to eradicate bias or stigma towards any religion and let our communities, especially our youth, believe and believe freely.
A federal judge dismissed a suit by Libby Hilsenrath, a New Jersey mother who claimed that a seventh-grade social studies course entitled “World Cultures and Geography,” which includes information on all of the world’s religions, attempted to indoctrinate students in the Islamic faith.
It was the late 1400s in India. Religious fanaticism combined with the caste system to create a culture where the ruling Mughals could and did round up commoners and slaughter them solely to slake their royal hounds’ thirst for blood.
As I dug deeper into his website I discovered a 28-minute video clip of a talk he gave several years ago at the Messiah Lutheran Church in Weldon Spring, MO. The talk was on Christian-Muslim relations. He was speaking passionately about increasing understanding between these two religious traditions. Turns out this is what he does. He says his calling is to increase the level of religious literacy in the world. Greater understanding paves the way to greater tolerance. He goes on to say that for him it’s more than work—it’s a divine inspiration.
In doing these things He sat in council with Adam. “Lord,” said Adam, “will You not grant us a gift—a miracle that happens not just once, but throughout eternity, as a daily reminder of Your grace and of Your presence in each person’s heart?”
The fear and suspicion of the sudden influx of foreigners in general and Irish-Catholics in particular spawned a political movement known variously as the “Native American Party” or the “American Party,” but more broadly as the “Know-Nothing Party.”
Well, is religion that dangerous or irrelevant? Should we consider being evangelical about the gospel of Nothingness? Shall we take John Lennon at his word and “imagine” no religion, no heaven above, “living only for today?”
There’s a Jewish legend about what happens to us before we are born. An Angel appears and introduces us to all the high and low places in the world, all the great works of Nature, all the important and trivial affairs of men.