May 16, 2002, 12.53am IST.
Despite continuing conflict, prejudices that once seemed inherent in our nature, are giving way. However, frequently, organised religion poses a formidable obstacle in the path, especially when fanatics seek credence from it. Yet, a lot has been achieved elsewhere: women were generally regarded as inferior. But now, globally, the concept of equality of the sexes is a universally accepted principle.
Nationalism faces a similar fate. One has to distinguish between patriotism that enriches one’s life, and submission to inflammatory rhetoric that provokes hatred and fear. Nationalistic rites are as often marked by feelings of awkwardness as they are by the strong convictions and enthusiasm of earlier times. The fetish for absolute national sovereignty is on its way out.
Millions continue to endure the effects of ingrained prejudices of ethnicity, gender, nation, caste and class. Such injustices persist because the institutions and standards we devise only slowly become empowered to construct new and better orders. Nevertheless, fundamental principles have been identified, articulated, and are becoming progressively incarnated in institutions capable of influencing public behaviour.
In contrast to processes of unification that are transforming the rest of our social relationships, the suggestion that all the world’s great religions are equally valid in nature and origin is stubbornly resisted by entrenched patterns of sectarian thought. Racial integration will arise from the recognition that the earth’s people constitute a single species whose many variations do not themselves confer any advantage or impose any handicap on individual members.
Preoccupation with agendas that disperse and vitiate human energies has led religious institutions to discourage exploration of reality and the exercise of mankind’s intellectual faculties. Denunciations of materialism or terrorism are of no real assistance in coping with the contemporary mor-al crisis if they do not begin by addressing the failure of responsibility that has left believing masses exposed and vulnerable to these influences.
Such reflections are less an indictment of organised religion than a reminder of the unique power it represents. Religion reaches to the roots of motivation. When it has been faithful to the example of those who gave the world its great belief systems, it has awakened in whole populations capacities to love, forgive, create, dare greatly, overcome prejudice and sacrifice for the common good.
Growing numbers of people are coming to realise that the truth underlying all religions is essentially one. This recognition arises not thro-ugh a resolution of theological disputes but as an intuitive awareness born from the ever widening experience of others and from a dawning acceptance of the oneness of the human family. Out of the welter of religious doctrines, rituals and legal codes inherited from vanished worlds, there is emerging a sense that spiritual life, like the oneness manifest in diverse nationalities, races and cultures, constitutes one unbounded reality accessible to everyone.
Religion and science are the two indispensable knowledge systems through which potentialities of consciousness develop. These fundamental modes of the mind’s exploration of reality are mutually dependent and have been most productive in those rare but happy periods of history when their complementary nature has been recognised and they have been able to work together. The insights and skills generated by scientific advance will have always to look to spiritual and moral commitment to ensure their appropriate application; religious convictions, no matter how cherished, must submit willingly to impartial testing by scientific methods.
(Abridged from an address by the Universal House of Justice, Baha’i World Centre, to the world’s religious heads)
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