War and peace. And we are really fortunate to have a very interesting collection of individuals to to discuss this, to launch a discussion of this.
So what I'm going to do is just introduce each of them, and then I've asked them each to speak for about ten or 15 minutes,
and then we can open it up to discussion, perhaps let them at the end, also make some reflections.
So immediately on my right is, is professor Professor Nigel Biggar,
who's probably known to many of you the readings professor of moral and pastoral theology here in Oxford,
based at Christchurch College, previously at Leeds, the Chair of Theology and at Trinity College Dublin,
who I've had the chance to interact with a couple of times on the subject of war and peace, but who also, of course,
works more broadly on the contribution of religion to liberal democracies, theories of natural law,
and the theology and ethics of national identity and loyalty and forgiveness.
I won't go into everyone's individual publications, of which there are many, but of course he's written widely on all of these topics.
Then we are lucky to have Tony Coady, who's visiting Oxford for a six month period, who again may be known to many of you,
a very well known Australian philosopher who writes on epistemology, political violence, political ethics.
He has also been, in addition to writing on violence, working on political philosophy more broadly,
and he was the founder of the Centre for Philosophy and Public Issues at the University of Melbourne,
really the first centre in Australia to become concerned with those issues.
What later became absorbed into Cappie, which some of you will know about?
Well, I'm a man, Marnie. Thirdly, who is a research fellow, visiting research fellow, both with Iraq and the Centre for International Studies,
who's worked for a number of years on peace, justice and human and human security, both as an analyst and scholar, but also as a practitioner.
She's been the executive director of the International Centre for Ethnic Studies in Colombo,
as well as Senior Advisor to the Centre for Humanitarian Dialogue in Geneva, where she now lives.
She's worked with Oxfam Africa and she also worked interestingly,
I didn't know this on the Commission for Global Governance and managed the launch of their report,
which many of you will remember our global neighbourhood. And she's recently been working quite a lot on,
on the principle of the responsibility to protect from a variety of perspectives and non-Western perspectives in particular.
And she worked with Tom Weise on a publication which we launched here last year.
So that is our panel. And as I say, a very illustrious one and a good one for discussing the issues today.
So I'm going to let Nigel begin and then we'll just go and turn before we open it up to discussion.
Thank you very much. It seems to me that a lot of the public discussion of the role of religion in relation to peace and war is simplistic.
And sometimes that simplistic discussion even takes place within the walls of universities.
So I'm going to begin by complicating matters. First of all, I want to complicate peace.
Peace can mean basically or tolerably just peace.
It can mean a peace which establishes the conditions for social and individual flourishing.
And where conflict is managed politically, that's optimal peace.
Or peace can mean simply the absence of war.
Or it can mean not the absence of war, but our not fighting it.
And so in that last sense, in the sense of peace, meaning we're at peace.
France and the UN remained at peace in 1994, which left the U2 at peace in Rwanda to slaughter 800,000 Tutsi.
In other words, what was peace for us? For the lives of us? Wasn't peace for the Tutsi?
Likewise, Europe and Nito remained at peace in 1995, which left the Bosnian Serbs, or some of them of peace, to slaughter 70,000 Bosnian Muslims.
And for a breach of peace for us didn't mean peace for them.
So the first point is peace. And when we talk about peace, we need to be discriminant and clear about what we're talking about.
Some peace is good, unequivocally just peace where everyone flourishes and conflicts are resolved politically.
It's good, unequivocally, that some other kinds of peace may be more morally ambiguous.
So if peace is complicated, if you agree with me that peace is complicated, then so is war.
Now, no sane person would dispute that war causes terrible evils,
and by evils I mean non moral evils in the sense of damage or destruction that kills people.
It names people, it destroys infrastructure.
It's that evil, whether it's right or wrong.
We get to decide to decide, but it's certainly evil. Some people believe that war causes such evils, that it can never be right to wage it.
Those people we would call pacifists.
Pessimists believe that war has always and ever were wrong and either that there are other sufficiently effective ways of dealing with,
for example, the machete wielding Hutu mobs and ruthless Bosnian Serbs.
Or they believe that there aren't effective alternatives.
But the going to war would still only make things worse.
But by the way, perfect pacifists reckon that going to war not only causes evils, but is always in the very wrong.
However, if you're not if you're not a pacifist and I'm not, then going to war, notwithstanding the evils it causes, might be morally right.
It might be morally justified depending upon the circumstances, and depending, of course, on what criteria of justification you use.
So second obligation is that war is not simply evil in the moral sense of wrong unless you are a pacifist.
Lots of my my my complications of religion. So I'm covering all three times and I'm talking just to make sure everything's properly complicated.
But any student of religion knows that one of the most basic problems in the field of religious studies is how to define and identify religion.
What is it? For example, is Buddhism, which is atheist, a religion, Buddhist, don't believe in a in a divine being.
It is a fact of the atheist. Is it a religion? And if so, why?
Or is Marxism, with its biblical faith in the assuredly upward, if not straightforward, march of history toward the communist social utopia?
Is that religious? Is Marxism religious? So how we define what religion is is problematic.
And even where we identify two phenomena that fall directly into the category of religion,
how much does that allow us to presume that these two phenomena have significant things in common?
For example, what exactly has a blood soaked Aztec priest got to do with a mild mannered Oxford Quaker?
They're both religious. So to do that is an interesting and common.
So the very concept of religion is difficult and elusive. What's more, any long standing religious tradition,
especially if it's taken root in a variety of parts of the world, is going to be internally plural.
So, for example, Christianity embraces, on the one hand, the anti militarism of the first three centuries A.D.,
the clerical and monastic issue of violence and the pacifism of the Mennonites and the Quakers.
That's all on the one hand.
On the other hand, Christianity also embraces the just war tradition that runs from Augustine in the early fifth century through Aquinas and Grotius,
and right up to the present day, both the Christian.
Both sides are Christian. And finally,
any longstanding religious tradition that had has had the opportunity to shape public policy is likely to have had to have a mixed historical record.
So on the one hand, for example, Christianity's record includes, of course,
the Crusades and the Inquisition and the so-called religious wars of the 16th and 17th century.
But then, on the other hand, there's also the tradition of just war thinking, which in tends to limit and moderate the use of violent force.
And in that tradition is, for example, the courageous stand against the complicit Goodall's war on the Amerindians in the 16th century,
taken by the likes of Bartolomeo de las Casas and Francisco de Vitoria,
Victoria argued out of the Just War petition that the complicit laws justification for waging war on the Amerindians,
namely that they would benefit from the imposition of the Christian Gospel.
Vitoria said, according to just war principles, that is unjust.
So all three terms of our discussion religion, war and peace are complicated and intelligent.
Discussion of them will not permit I very much generalisation in the brief rest of what I have to say,
I'm going to focus on the Christian tradition of just war thinking,
whose first major proponent was a bastion of hippo in North Africa in the early fifth century A.D.?
No. I mean, there's a whole industry working on just war doctrine.
I'm going to limit myself to making about 3 minutes worth of remarks, but it'll get us going.
So the first the first thing to say is that the theory of just war was born during the period when having
spent the first three centuries of their existence on the social and political margins of the Roman Empire.
And often, often at the sharp end of it, literally the sharp end.
Christians in the fourth century A.D. for the first time had the opportunity to hold positions of political responsibility,
and that included responsibility for maintaining law and order. So in the early four hundreds, Christian tribunes such as Marcellinus and Boniface,
who had responsibility for keeping the peace by means of force if need be,
wrote to Augustine of Hippo in North Africa to ask how their political responsibilities were compatible with their Christian
profession and some of the earliest expressions of just war theory emerge in Augustine's pastoral response to them.
That's where it started in Christian tradition. Here are a few highlights of what the just war or Just War Thinking consists of.
First of all, the paradigm of a just war is not self-defence.
Indeed, Augustine regarded self-defence as morally suspect.
The paradigm of a just war is intervention to rescue the innocent from unjust aggression.
So what that means, of course, is that the ethic of Christian just war thinking contradicts what has become
international law and the dominant secular philosophical conception of just war.
The paradigm is intervention, not self-defence. Second point, just war.
Therefore also has the general form of punishment. And this is this is highly controversial.
We need to be careful here what we mean by punishment,
which nowadays is often conflated with retribution, which itself is often completed with vengeance.
Both completions are mistakes.
Just war has a basically punitive form in the sense that it is a negative or hostile response to the perpetrator of an unjust act.
A negative or hostile response to the perpetrator of an unjust act.
A just war, therefore, can't be basically about imperial expansion.
It can't be basically about spreading the gospel to the Indians of the Caribbean.
Nor can it be basically about compelling the Chinese to open up their markets to the sale of Indian opium.
It can only be about responding to an act of grave injustice.
The basic form of this war is punitive. That tells us nothing.
Nothing about what punishment is for, but what it's what it ends or what its goals are.
What should these be? Certainly the goals of punishment should be to halt the perpetration of injustice,
to persuade the perpetrator not to resume it, and to deter others from pursuing it.
In other words, defensive and deterrent. Those are those are the purposes.
What the goal of punishment should not be is the annihilation of the perpetrator.
Christian punishment may not be vengeful, and since there are international courts available,
just war should not be retributive in the narrow sense of assessing the culpability of
the main perpetrators of injustice and apportioning proportionate punishment to them,
or as too blunt and indiscriminate an instrument for that.
But it is punitive in defensive and in deterrence.
Answers, finally. My final point, just war from a Christian point of view is war that is justified.
All things considered, it is not war that is just in the sense of morally pure or holy just.
War is not a crusade. It is not a holy war.
It is only ever waged by one set of sinners against others, not simply by the righteous against simply unrighteous.
It is absolutely not Manichaean. It does not distinguish sharply between the children of light on the one hand, and the turn of darkness on the other.
And it is important to remember that Manichaeism was a Christian heresy, which Augustine repudiated.
He wasn't out of here for a while, so he knew what he was talking about, knew what it repudiating, and which the church ever since has contradicted.
We human beings are often bound up in each other's wrongdoing to some extent.
For example, the victors of 1918 gave rise through the Treaty of Versailles to the rise of Nazism.
But that isn't to say that France and Britain were wrong to go to war in punitive response to Hitler's invasion of Poland in 1949.
We went to war then with an appropriately heavy heart, and rightly so.
So no simple, righteous against the unrighteous. Most of them.
Thank you so much. Tony, over to you here.
I've got to think we have so much to stand up on the podium.
Sure. Yes. Absolutely. Delighted. Dominating perspective on.
And I should say we need to be a bit kind to Tony because we've got a bit of a call. So I think you'll you'll manage to detect that as I go.
And it may affect my timing. I've got this down 30 minutes, I think.
Every era has assumptions of the past, of the mirror's positive and onwards, social, political outlooks and programmes of independence.
Until recently, for instance,
this apparent incapacity of women for the sort of reasoning required from political participation was one such assumption.
The premises of the pervasive managerialism that in fact that has infected so many institutions of democratic societies,
including Santa Fe universities, provide another example.
The apparent business of widespread instinctive acceptance of such assumptions make them hard to expose to
critical evaluation or to have such evaluation taken seriously in our own time and for some time earlier.
Another such assumption has been that which assigned to religion and religious difference an inherent tendency to violence.
It seems to me that this assumption is wrong, or at least sufficiently wrongheaded,
to distort our understanding of both religion and the resort to violence such as warfare.
In this short talk, I went directly to discuss religion and peace,
but a critique of the assumption about the tendency to violence should remove some obstacles to that discussion.
Recently, the assumption and its implications have started to come under stringent scrutiny,
most radically in Bill Kavanaugh's writings, culminating his book The Myth of Religious Violence.
Kavanaugh's thesis, to summarise his thought all too simplistically,
involves two separable but supporting arguments to the effect that claims about the inherent tendency of religion to promote violence,
to open up, to be taken seriously.
One is the sharp separation of religion from other areas of human life is peculiarly modern emotion and a mostly Western phenomenon.
Consequently, much of the evidence for the violent propensities of religion is drawn from context in
which motivations for violence multi-faceted and what would now be called religion,
merely one integrated element in a motive set.
This integration continues today in societies that have not embraced secularity in the way that most European society have.
The second argument is that the repeated failures by theorists to provide a satisfactory definition of religion.
So the idea, which has already been mentioned by Nigel, shows that the idea of religion is too muddled,
even incoherent, to support the claims about religion's tendency to promote violence.
Kavanaugh does not, of course, deny that there are particular faiths such as Christianity and Islam.
But he thinks that the construct religion is a sort of vague portmanteau into
which all sorts of old fashioned things are put by the modern secular mind.
The advantage for that secular mind, according to him,
is to facilitate a sharp contrast between its own benign prominences and the potential dark savagery of those who don't conform to its prescriptions.
I think Kavanaugh's critique is very valuable,
but some of his claims about how difficult it is in past cultures to find a phenomenon like what we call today religion,
and how distinctive is our current separation of religion from other aspects of life are disputable.
Although pre-modern societies did not place such a wide gulf between the domains of religion or those of politics and other particular activities,
there is plenty of evidence that they distinguish between them.
Indeed, Christ's dictum the of the things of the seasons of God, the things that are God already contained such a distinction.
Martin Rees spoke about the new book, The Promise of Salvation.
The Theory of Religion provides plenty of counterexamples as well.
Moreover, it's plausible that a broad, though no doubt fuzzy definition or general account of religion can be serviceable,
though it will no doubt contain some element of stipulation.
Read about provides an interesting such account predominantly in terms of characteristics of characteristic action rather than belief.
It concentrates on practices that quote aim at establishing contact with superhuman
powers with the purpose of averting or mitigating misfortune and securing salvation.
Well, what do we think of that? Or of canon, of analytic rejection, of the religion concept?
The integration argument that Kavanaugh announced is detachable from his more sweeping claim and initially more plausible
to take the terrorist activities of contemporary Islamic fundamentalists as simply manifest manifestations of religion,
for instance, is to ignore the way that their religious commitments complement and intersect with
political outlooks and grievances that would make perfect sense to non-religious people,
even though they seldom bother to examine such motivations, convinced as they are that the cause of the violence is wholly religious.
But as a lot of papers argue, an examination of the motives and background of suicide bombers from 1980 to 2003,
a total of 315 attacks excluding those commissioned by states.
An examination that shows that religion is seldom what he called a significant factor in the motivation.
Papers recently upgraded his day. Buddhism is now examined over 2000 suicide bombing cases with similar conclusions.
He sums up his conclusions as religion is rarely the root cause,
though it's often used as a tool by terrorist organisations in recruiting and in other efforts in service of the broader strategic objective.
Inevitably, work and methodology have come under criticism,
especially regarding his strong claims about the unique role of foreign intervention of occupation in provoking terrorist attacks.
Nonetheless,
his basic claims about the relatively slight or secondary nature of religious motivation in most suicide bombings compared to the mundane,
earthly ones is, I think, accurate enough to be instructive for my purposes.
So I would say there are three things with the focus on religion's supposed spatial and adherent tendency towards violence.
Violence tends to obscure one that there are many dreadful outbreaks and then justify violence.
The cause or motivation of origins of which have nothing to do with religion.
Pol Pot, Mao and Stalin, they are only right are responsible for staggering massacres that cannot be attributed to their orders,
religious implications, or that they follow it. Followers war in spite of Richard Dawkins claim to the contrary.
Is it credible that Hitler's murderous campaigns had a religious motivation,
even in less dramatic conflicts than these factors like nationalism, border disputes,
great power ambitions, imperialism and racism have been significant factors in outbreaks of violence,
including wars, often with little or no influence from religion.
Secondly, but the simple credo of religion causes violence like Christopher Hitchens
ludicrous subtitle of his book God Is Not Great How Religion Poisons Everything.
It ignores too many distinctions. There are and have been all sorts of religions with a great many different practices,
ethical commitments and changes over the course of their history.
It may well be that some religions or versions of the same religion are prone to further violence,
towards violence where other religions or other versions of the same religion and no such tendency,
even if it could be shown that Islam, such as Osama bin Laden, had a commitment to unjustified violence.
This would have no relevance, for instance, from the Sufi version of Islam, nor the Quaker version of Christianity.
Three That the focus on religion as a major cause of wars, terrorism or other forms of political violence obscures many of the more mundane,
specific causes of violent conflict that political leaders and the rest of us often find inconvenient to acknowledge.
This is true even when there are issues of religion invoked by the leaders of the campaigns of violence.
Even Osama bin Laden's various diatribes, referring to holy duties and caliphate,
contained numerous claims about straightforward political grievances,
such as Israel's occupation of Palestine, land and military policing and political persecution.
As he saw the Palestinian people claims about past and present Western support for
Middle Eastern dictatorships and Western exploitation of Middle Eastern assets.
The United States historic deployment of troops throughout Arab lands and of course, more recently, the US led invasion of Iraq and Afghanistan.
A fascinating example of the complexity I been trying to point out is Peter Wilson's new book,
A History of the 30 Years War, which argues that this war so often invoked as the typical religious war,
the duration of which was caused by religious fanaticism in the common understanding,
was it, Wilson says, quote, Not primarily a religious war at all.
There were, of course, religious elements that could hardly have been otherwise.
In 17th century Europe, when Christian fight was an aspect of life integrated to varying degrees with other central aspects.
But most contemporary observers, he says, quote, spoke of imperial, Bavarian, Swedish or bohemian troops, not Catholic or Protestant, unquote.
The war, indeed, began with a somewhat religious episode, the famous defensive defenestration of Prague,
in which a Protestant Protestant gang threw three Catholic imperial officials out the window.
They fell from the height, appealing to the Virgin Mary, and landed in the sun almost entirely unarmed.
No doubt those youth will think that is nothing to do with you, but I'm rather impressed by that.
Beginning with that, the ferocity and duration of the war was not you.
Argues Wilson, to religious fanaticism but dynastic ambition and political fissure.
As one reviewer of the book summarises the argument, quote, The empire's hundreds of small territories were able to fight.
They assumed impossible debts, adulterated their coinages, and triggered a ruinous inflation.
Unpaid armies could be neither supplied, and then they thought remained in.
The field nourished on plunder. A crucial point in unlikely three considerations is that a primary factor in outbreaks of violence?
Is attachment to identity and Balaam a perceived threat to it?
Religion certainly provides one focus for this attachment alone, but so do a great range of other things.
Identity is closely related to power, self-respect and perceived culpable positioning,
so that religion will often be appropriated to bolster or create culturally significant identities by those who have or want power.
I think probably the relation between the sexes is important.
Is important. The fashioning of a male identity was often dominant overall, as we thought,
with often dominant roles over and against female has been a feature of history because religion has contributed.
But it seems to me to be even deeper sociologically than any religious influence.
I was going to finish with a brief word piece, but go ahead.
It's very brief and probably not very helpful, but I just thought I would cover the ground.
I've said very little about religion and peace, so I'll conclude with a brief comment.
Peace is a complex concept that with many interpretations and conceptions built around it over the ages,
I dealt with some of these complexities in my book Morality and Political Violence, available at all good bookshops for a very reasonable price.
I would conjecture without being that what I had to get into,
I would conjecture without being an expert on comparative religion that there are very few religions that don't make the value of peace.
A significant part of it, not a garden, for instance, places at the heart of his Christo's intricate ethical system along with love.
It's true that, as with many other Christians and non-Christians,
he thought it compatible with the idea of just war and extremists, though other Christians have required pacifism.
Certainly there's room for peacemakers and activists to build upon the doctrines of priests, at least in many religions.
And that's why I thought it might be a lot of fun.
Thank you very much. It's great, Grandma.
You're going to stand as well. Are you going to sit? Whatever you like. I'll stand so I can see everyone.
Should they stand here, they may be a stand that they have something for something.
Lucky thanks to Ella somehow managing always to pull together occasions like this so we can get into a real debate having the argument.
And I'm very happy I come third and it's very tempting to jump right into the debate with all of what you put on the table.
I'll start with the points I wanted to make, because it fits in very well where Tony left off,
where I would agree that we need to move away from the simplifications,
the simple causality that is drawn all too often since especially the end of the Cold War between religion and war,
the simplicity around peace and war and the moral goodness of badness, and whether or not religions are simplistically drawn towards violence.
What I would say is, while deferring to the fact that religions have managed in many of religious leaders, religious movements,
religious initiatives have managed to make extraordinarily inspiring contributions to peace in many different ways.
We won't go into that right now from kind of individual examples like Sant'Egidio to Occupy.
The whole time I started speaking, what is it,
one of seven or so in Mozambique or to movements like peace movements to a religious leaders of different faiths in the Great Lakes region.
On the whole, I would be still inclined to argue that religions remain today a greater malady, a greater cause of violence than a cause of peace.
And the problem, I feel, is that we as academics, have jumped on to the bandwagon of looking primarily at extremism and extreme
religious fundamentalism as the cause of such violence that deflects attention,
as you very rightly pointed out, for what I think is much more serious, which is right under our feet.
It was found in the year 2000 and the Millennium Survey that was conducted by Gallup, that contrary to our belief in secularism,
actually something close to 90% of the world's population claims to be fearful,
or possibly a maximum of about 14% would define themselves as atheists.
Everyone else is agnostic. Plus the vast majority still remain Christian and Muslim.
But for those Hindus also very, very a major.
And I would say that what we really need to be looking at is the mainstream beliefs and unexamined practices of the mainstream believer.
So it's not those few extremists at the fringes of the Islamic and other, you know,
cultish movements who suddenly have explosions of violence here and there, including terrorist violence,
but actually mainstream beliefs and practices, because these are accepted, these are not examined,
and they are the cause for, if not both current violence and potential violence.
Let me highlight some of the reasons why I believe religion for these respects to be peaceful does involve invited,
has been called upon to examine and possibly conclude by seeing what could change or how could this be changed?
What are these common beliefs and practices?
Many religions will come back, hopefully in the discussion to discuss what are religion them talking about the principal, the media.
There are something like 2500 religions out there. No, 12,000.
But the five major ones have the majority of of people adhering to them.
So the major religions the first one is the belief in singularity.
My religion is the best we can see how easily it has in the past and continues to at present lead to divisions within society,
domination within society. Which leads to the second problem, which is many of these religions have proselytising tendencies.
Even religions which were originally not proselytising like Buddhism, have become major proselytising.
Many reasons why proselytising is going on across the world.
We now know the majority of Christians and Hindus are not in their countries or regions of origin,
but in Asia, Africa, Latin America, etc. Why is this a problem?
The kinds of incentives,
including financial incentives given across that is privatisation leading to a huge cleavage in haves and have nots within these societies,
a change in religious demographics within one generation.
And the consequences of that, the fact that we know that recent converts are much more prone to extreme behaviour in their religious view.
And so all the reasons why Protestantism is an ongoing cause of concern practised by religions.
The third one is anthropocentric system, the belief central in Abrahamic religions, but community picked up by others.
That man is the apex of creation and that all of creation,
all of nature is at his I his deliberately disposal to use and get rid off which has led throughout history and right now.
I mean are the centre of a kind of rapacity that we simply of exploiting nature and exploiting lesser beings believing that he is the cream of.
Male authority, which to already referred to the exclusion of women from positions of authority and extraordinarily by extraordinary violence,
which religion has condoned or sometimes exhorted against women within the community,
which is directly related to the kind of violence we've seen in the Democratic
Republic of Congo in all these conflict against women outside the community.
If religion is so permissive about violence within two women, within your own family.
Well, where are the bounds when it's outside force?
Again, referred to by my colleagues the North connection nexus between religion and power,
bowing very often not to the dictates of the founding fathers or mothers of religion being at the service of justice in this world,
as in the universe, but rather of consorting with power to the negligence of issues of injustice.
And then this issue, which is completely overlooked, the attention given to form over substance,
the predominance of gradualism and maintaining the institutions,
often not simply ignoring but actually contradicting the fundamental values underlying that religion,
the founding of universal principles of that religion, the imperviousness to change in.
If we go back and look at how all major religions had built into them very, very deep practices of debate, critical inquiry, discussion.
You know, the Socratic debate was not limited to Socrates.
It was at the core of even Judaism, Hinduism, Christianity, Islam was all about that which has disappeared.
And now there's a rigid appearance to the rituals, the practices, but not actually examining the fundamental truths and and debating them,
which has meant that all of this has led to religions becoming the opposite of what they were meant to be and defined as being,
which is the degree which ought to have been a triple linkage,
really taking human beings to ourselves through the internal debate to each other
within society and our societal dealings with each other and us in the universe,
and how we deal with this creation of which we are part. And I would say these are the reasons why these unexamined beliefs and practices,
which most of us are somehow involved with one way or another on most religions and religious believers are involved with these
other causes for violence deserving as much attention now as the extremist fundamentalist actions that we tend to study much more.
What could be the way out? A few simple steps.
One would be for all religions, religious institutions, religious believers and individuals to systematically prioritise justice over power,
to return to the kind of commitment that one finds in traditions like like the theology,
liberation theology of Latin America, which spread across the Global South.
The second would be to integrate everything that has been excluded, divided, marginalised, of course, starting with women.
But all of the other kinds of discrimination,
often very violent that goes on and is justified by religion and thinking of gays and thinking of minorities,
of lower caste in my own country, of origin, of undertaking critical inquiry,
bringing that back into the core of religious practice, not resort learning, not practice of rituals,
but critical inquiry of bringing together religion and bringing together the rationality with faith,
moving off the high pedestal of believing that monotheism is somehow the pinnacle of human development and evolution and bowing,
deferring to the wisdom of so-called costal religions at this age of ecological devastation,
recognising what they were seeing of our place very humbly as a small part of an interdependent universe, which we are rapidly destroying.
So bringing in this value of cosmic pandering and turning towards self-examination,
contemplation and conscious evolution rather than the triumphalism that tends to go with religions,
I end up as I can't help it with two wonderful women and their quotes from Teresa of Avila
Such a champion for introspection in the world gone crazy in Spain with the Inquisition,
who said Why this great war between the countries, the countries inside of us?
What are all these insane borders you protect? What are all these different names for?
The same church of love you live together for?
It is true. Together we live on only at a shrine where all are welcome Will God sing loud enough to be heard and on many centuries before her her.
So the Sufi in in Basra, Rabia is on his sleeve, too.
And Singh said, in my heart there was a temple, a church, a synagogue.
What is that? A mosque where I knew prayer should bring us to an altar where no gods and no needs exist.
And if we could return to that.
Religions, all religions, the believers and the non-believers and the agnostic could become actually champions of building peace in our society.
Thank you. And I hope that leads us into a lively discussion. Thanks so much.
Grateful everybody stuck fairly well to time. So I opened up to the questions.
Comments.