Interfaith Quotes

I believe in recognizing every human being as a human being--neither white, black, brown, or red; and when you are dealing with humanity as a family there's no question of integration or intermarriage. It's just one human being marrying another human being or one human being living around and with another human being.

Individual cultures and ideologies have their appropriate uses but none of them erase or replace the universal experiences, like love and weeping and laughter, common to all human beings.

If the idea of loving those whom you have been taught to recognize as your enemies is too overwhelming, consider more deeply the observation that we are all much more alike than we are unalike.

Awakening to faith is not a one-time event, but a continuously unfolding reality. The journey of faith is not a race, but a marathon of love that each person walks at a different pace.

We live in a time when we have a communal duty to receive and broadcast love. We must set aside our repeating arguments and get a handle on our destructive depressions. pg vi

Any person who, with all the sincerity of heart, is in search for God, on land or in the sea, is worthy of respect.

Most mainline Protestant churches are, to one degree or another, post-Christian. If they no longer seem disposed to converting the unbelieving to Christ, they can at least convert them to the boggiest of soft-left clichés, on the grounds that if Jesus were alive today he’d most likely be a gay Anglican bishop in a committed relationship driving around in an environmentally friendly car with an “Arms are for Hugging” sticker on the way to an interfaith dialogue with a Wiccan and a couple of Wahhabi imams.

I don't think anyone could really know her, just as the peak of her struggle blooms, she again appearered to have held it all together when the whole world; would have thought, she'd fall Apart.

In 762, to symbolize and propel the new order, Al-Mansur decided to build the grand new capital of Baghdad as a massive round city. The caliph assembled an elite team of the empire’s top engineers, architects, and visionaries—notably including Zoroastrians, Christians, and Jews, such as Mashallah Ibnul-Athari.

I put people before gods. I respect believers of all kinds and work to promote interfaith dialogue, but my whole life I've seen religion used as a weapon, and I'm putting all weapons down.

Many people are coming to believe that the tenets of Christianity and Marxism can actually be meshed, but they make the mistake of believing the result can still be called Christianity.

Even if our doubts span an entire ocean, the light of God’s wisdom can rise beyond the furthest horizons and illuminate our hearts with a deep sense of contentment.

The process of reconciliation implies that people who want to engage in interfaith cooperation should be prepared to reflect critically on their own religious tradition. They should also contemplate what place their own religious tradition assigns to people of other faith traditions. (by Cilliers, Ch. 3, p. 52)

Abraham had eight sons--not one. All eight sons bring something to the table. Abraham loved all of his sons. He was a good father who made sure all his sons were literate, of good character and shared a common ideology with their father, Abraham. Abraham did good. Where did we go wrong?

One of the biggest challenges for people involved in interfaith dialogue is to break down the stereotypes of the "other" that exist within their own religious traditions and groups. Religious groups need to first acknowledge and confess their own role in fostering and contributing to injustice and conflict. (by Cilliers, Ch. 3, p. 49)

When we lose the contemplative mind, or non-dual consciousness, we invariably create violent people. The dualistic mind is endlessly argumentative, and we created an argumentative continent, which we also exported to North and South America. We see it in our politics; we see it in our Church’s inability to create any sincere interfaith dialogue—or even intra-faith dialogue. The Baptists are still fighting the Anglicans as “lost” and the Evangelicals are dismissing the Catholics as the “Whore of Babylon,” and we Catholics are demeaning everybody else as heretics, and each of us is hiding in our small, smug circles. What a waste of time and good God-energy, while the world suffers and declines. We have divided Jesus.

believers fight each other over the correct interpretation and even kill members of their own faiths in battles over doctrine. Civilization has been immensely retarded by such arcane interfaith quarrels and could now be destroyed by their modern versions.

At the end of the day, developing goodness comes down to a simple question: Will this emotion, thought or action, increase or decrease my capacity for goodness?

God’s love supersedes all religions and it is the core of all religions.

chances of the Jews and Palestinians uniting to build the first interfaith space station are roughly equal.

What Does It Matter What We Believe, as long as we treat others the way we want to be treated?

There's power in believing there's a God in each of us because if we are made in His/Her/Their image, aren't we all like good horcruxes for God? Because a piece of them is in us?

There can be no understanding where there is mutual rejection.

When religious groups in a conflict eliminate the personal element and perceive themselves as representatives of collectives, heir actions tend to become more "radical" and "merciless." (Ch.3, by Jaco Cilliers, p. 48)

I strongly feel that it is only when there is a deep understanding of one's own religious beliefs and commitments that progress can be made in achieving true understanding and respect for the religious values and beliefs of others. Engaging in interfaith dialogue does not in any way mean undermining one's own faith or religious tradition. Indeed, interfaith dialogue is constructive only when people become firmly grounded in their own religious traditions and through that process gain a willingness to listen and respect the beliefs of other religions. (by Cilliers, Ch. 3, p. 48-49)

Not every christian is a good human, but every good human is a christian.

Interfaith is faith supreme.

Love never asks you to erase your past, Love never attempts to erase your identity. Love accepts your past and expands your present, Love embraces you as you, and empowers your identity.

The same three non-Muslims show up to our open house every year. They get serenaded as though they're royalty because we get to post "Mosque Opens Door to Greater Community, and THEY CAME!

Love is the most complex of all human phenomena. It exists on a spectrum from tolerance and kindness to romantic love and self-sacrifice, reaching its pinnacle in altruism, a love that needs nothing in return.

If you are mindful, you can eat the bread and the bread represents the whole cosmos...You set the table, you lay the food in the presence of God. Mindfulness is the awareness that shines on every act in every moment.

Many of the traditional approaches to interfaith dialogue have assumed that it can be successful only if agreements are reached about amorphous concepts and themes that various traditions may have in common. These approaches have also assumed that participants have to "weaken" or "compromise" elements of their own faith... this is not necessarily constructive for engaging in interfaith understanding and dialogue. It is only when participants have a deep understanding of their own religious traditions and are willing to learn and recognize the richness of other religious traditions that constructive cooperation can take place between groups from different faiths. (by Cilliers, Ch. 3, p. 57-58)

On the surface, we are all different. We ascribe to a variety of belief systems, attain our identity from various stories, get our customs from diverse cultures, and so on. And, rightly or wrongly, we generally define ourselves by these differences—there is no denying that. However, when we look beneath the surface, we discover certain universal elements.

English is my second language, My first language is love. Neuroscience is my second sense, My first sense is love. Theology is my second faith, My first faith is interfaith. Philosophy is my second nature, My first nature is to assimilate.

The fact that religions, which usually have at their core a promotion of tolerance and peace, have been exploited to carry out violence clearly indicates that individuals and groups have not discovered the true "peace message" that is inherent in almost every religion. (by Cilliers, Ch. 3, p. 55)

While I do not believe we are not witnessing a "clash of civilizations" between Christianity and Islam, it is a fantasy to imagine that the world's two largest religions are in any meaningful sense the same, or that interfaith dialogue between Christians and Muslims will magically bridge the gap.

Authentic religion teaches one to imagine the other -- to consider another's vulnerability and humanity. The beginning of ethics is this trancendent imagination' (Ingrid Mattson). The message, she said, to be expounded by preacher and politician alike is that all human beings possess a God-given dignity.

Integration is the cure for terrorism.

Saints don't turn water into wine, Saints just turn tears into cheer. Saints don't walk on water, Saints just walk on land, without drowning in hate and fear.

Religion is the lens through which we interpret the phenomena of existence, its determinants, and aftermath.

Hopelessness often spirals into destructive behavior that keeps damaged souls on a treadmill of negativity and self-fulfilling prophecies of defeat and disappointment.

Religion frees us from the existential emptiness that otherwise rules the material dimension and can kill the soul long before death claims the body.

The universal reason is love, The universal faith is love. All else is but a faint echo, Driving us away from love.

I am not east, I am not west, I am the whole world.

There is a commonality in our faith traditions that can help us turn away from polarization and re-create a greater sense of community in which our differences are honored.

Friday Azaan and Sunday Choir, All pray to the same light. Yet in our divisive stupidity, We use it as excuse to maintain divide.

The only alternative to talking is the building up of resentment and anger, which in the time must inevitably become open hostility and conflict.

To reach beyond tolerance is to open oneself to getting to know others, to appreciate their role in the world.

The terrorism has been a generation growing. It'll take a generation to knock it out.

The acceptance comes largely in the form of embracing Liberation Theology, the merging of Marxism and Christianity, hence, my term, Marxianity.

Dialogue still reigns supreme as a method for connection and conflict resolution.

Bridges are made with intention. They make it possible to go between two places that were previously difficult to access.

Faith tethered solely to books and not the heart, inadvertently becomes a breeding ground of superstition, bigotry and prejudice.

Divide and divine can never go together.

My mission is to flood the world with Christs by the thousands, Buddhas by the hundreds, and Mevlanas by the millions.

My holiness is rooted in life and humanity. Life is sweet, life is holy, when lived for humanity.

Grow out of the kindergarten of scripture, earn your admittance into the university of love.

There is more to faith, family and tradition than white, straight and christian.

It is a pity,” he wrote, “that people should let themselves be defeated by the problems, cares, and difficulties of human existence, and it is quite unnecessary.

The criticism that I think is more telling is that the only way you are going to knock out this terrorism eventually is not just through the force of arms, but through the force of ideas.

Unless the republic is reclaimed, the time will come when all of us will be one incorrect meal, one interfaith romance, one unfortunate misstep away from being extinguished. The mobs that slaughtered ‘bad’ Muslims will eventually come for Hindus who are not ‘good’. India’s tragedy is that just when it is faced with an existential crisis, there exists no pan-Indian alternative to the BJP.

At Abraham's burial, his two most prominent sons, rivals since before they were born, estranged since childhood, scions of rival nations, come together for the first time since they were rent apart nearly three-quarters of a century earlier. The text reports their union nearly without comment. "His sons Isaac and Ishmael buried him in the cave of Machpelah, in the field of Ephron son of Zohar the Hittite, facing Mamre, in the field that Abraham had bought from the Hittites." But the meaning of this moment cannot be diminished. Abraham achieves in death what he could never achieve in life: a moment of reconciliation between his two sons, a peaceful, communal, side-by-side flicker of possibility in which they are not rivals, scions, warriors, adversaries, children, Jews, Christians, or Muslims. They are brothers. They are mourners. In a sense they are us, forever weeping for the loss of our common father, shuffling through our bitter memories, reclaiming our childlike expectations, laughing, sobbing, furious and full of dreams, wondering about our orphaned future, and demanding the answers we all crave to hear: What did you want from me, Father? What did you leave me with, Father? And what do I do now?

The upside of approaching spiritual practices like an experiment is that there can be no failure, only different outcomes. Whatever happens, you will learn about yourself and your relationship with the divine along the way.

Ever since the Enlightenment era in the 17th and 18th Centuries—which, among other things, gave birth to the U.S. Constitution and the de facto motto E Pluribus Unum (out of the many, one)—interfaith tolerance has been sown into the fabric of Western society. The rules of one religion are not made into law for all citizens because of a simple social agreement. For you to believe what you want, you must allow me to do the same, even if we disagree.

Furthermore, the Prophet’s gracious reception of the Christians of Najran in Medina, where he allowed them to pray in his mosque and affirmed the continuing protection of their churches, set a new standard for inter-faith relations.42

Secularism has three stages. First, you realize, all religions pray to the same God. Second, you realize, God exists only in the human heart. Finally, all talk of God disappears, and what remains among the humans, is a natural sense of oneness.

If we can resist destructive ideas, we can cultivate the positive feelings that lead to productive actions that can bring us peace of mind, energy, and vitality; relief from worry and heartache; and personal fulfillment and professional triumph.

The point of interfaith conversation is not to convert the person across the table, but it is also not to abdicate one’s own theology for the sake of reaching agreement. Put another way: there is no reason for Jews and Christians to sacrifice their particular beliefs on the altar of interfaith sensitivity. The former bishop of Sweden and dean of Harvard Divinity School Krister Stendahl speaks appropriately of “holy envy,” that is, the appreciation of the beliefs and practices of another.

Interspirituality is not for everyone, but, for those of us who are interested, we have never lived in a better time to explore interspiritual practices. For the first time in history, we have easy access to all of the world’s scriptures and spiritual traditions.

The greatest secret for eliminating the inferiority complex, which is another term for deep and profound self doubt, is to fill your mind to overflowing with faith. Develop a tremendous faith in God and that will give you a humble yet soundly realistic faith in yourself.

When studying the world’s religions, there appear to be two primary paths available to those who want to practice their faith. One path is internal and contemplative in nature. The other is emotional, external, and actionable in nature. I have identified these as the paths of oneness and goodness.

And it is only in its early stage. All those who believe they will remain untouched by its wrath are delusional. If Ehsan Jafri, a former member of parliament with a line to the deputy prime minister’s office, could be dragged out of his home and gashed and burned alive, what makes anyone think he or she will remain unharmed? If Aamir Khan, one of India’s biggest film stars, can be unpersoned; if Gauri Lankesh, one of its boldest journalists, can be shot dead; if Ramachandra Guha, one of its greatest historians, can be stopped from lecturing; if Naseeruddin Shah, among its finest actors, can be branded a traitor; if Manmohan Singh, the former prime minister, can be labelled an agent of Pakistan by his successor; if B.H. Loya, a perfectly healthy judge, can abruptly drop dead; if a young woman can be stalked by the police machinery of the state because Modi has displayed an interest in her—what makes the rest of us think we will remain untouched and unharmed? Unless the republic is reclaimed, the time will come when all of us will be one incorrect meal, one interfaith romance, one unfortunate misstep away from being extinguished. The mobs that slaughtered ‘bad’ Muslims will eventually come for Hindus who are not ‘good’.

Because Islam, besides coming at the end of the major cycle of revelations, had had an experience of the different religions of the world before modern times. I have always said that Islam is the only religion that had direct contact with nearly all the major families of religions of the world outside of the matrix of modernism.

I will be a better Catholic, not if I can refute every shade of Protestantism, but if I can affirm the truth in it and still go further. So, too, with the Muslims, the Hindus, the Buddhists, etc. This does not mean syncretism, indifferentism, the vapid and careless friendliness that accepts everything by thinking of nothing. There is much that one cannot 'affirm' and 'accept,' but first one must say 'yes' where one really can. If I affirm myself as a Catholic merely by denying all that is Muslim, Jewish, Protestant, Hindu, Buddhist, etc., in the end I will find there is not much left for me to affirm as a Catholic; and certainly no breath of the Spirit with which to affirm it.

...Dialogue is an activity that represents a state of relations going well beyond tolerance...You can coexist with people without ever having to speak meaningfully with them. What holds society together is not just people who will tolerate others, but people who will actually go beyond that, to provide the glue that nourishes social relationships.

The wars around the globe into which religion is woven -- violence that over the past two decades has sent many tens of thousands of men, women, and children to terrible deaths in the Balkans, Iraq, Afghanistan, Indonesia, India, Israel, the Palestinian territories, and the United States -- deeply threaten what we have of a human society. Denouncing religion itself is futile. And such simple reactions badly miss the point. It is among the religious believers that the work must be done, within that overwhelming majority who would find common ground in being human and not wanting destruction, if only because their traditions are about so much more. Those traditions contain life-giving possibilities, even if the worst demagogues would try to twist dogma so hard as to wring poison from it.

This notion of shared experience is important. A hiker, for example, has much more in common with other hikers who have walked paths foreign to him than with sedentary people who have never hiked anywhere but have read books about the hiker’s favorite path. If someone has hiked several mountains in Switzerland, for instance, he or she is likely to have more in common with those who have hiked in the Rocky Mountains than with those who have never hiked at all. The terrain may be different, but the act of hiking is similar. The same is true about spirituality. The acts of praying, meditating, fasting, contemplating deeply, and having other direct forms of experience, all influence practitioners differently than mere reading or listening. Moreover, because we all have the same tools to work with—body, mind, and spirit—practitioners from different faiths will have more in common than they realize.

Here, the Prophet was born in a settled and stable province of a strong Roman Empire. Much as in our timeline, Islamic civilisation, the dar-al Islam, flourished, but under Roman protection. There were no centuries of inter-faith conflict in Europe – no crusades, for instance. Even in the pre-Christian days, the Romans were always pragmatic about local religions. To the Romans, Islam is a muscular sister creed of the Christianity that is their official state religion.

Absolutism, in both religious and political idealism, is a splendid incentive to heroic action, but a dangerous guide in immediate and concrete situations. In religion, it permits absurdities and in politics cruelties, which fail to achieve justifying consequences because the inertia of human nature remains a nemesis to the absolute ideal...The fanaticism which in the individual may appear in the guise of a harmless or pathetic vagary, when expressed in political policy, shuts the gates of mercy on mankind.

Devotees of these two spiritual paths of experience—oneness and goodness—have been at odds for centuries. Proponents of the oneness path have insisted that the goal of spirituality is to reconnect with everlasting eternity. They yearn to taste the quintessence of their being, to transcend time and space, to be unified with the one. In the other camp, advocates of the goodness path have traditionally seen stark choices in the world. They believe we should choose love, compassion, beauty, truth, and altruism over hatred, fear, anger, judgment, and other opposites of goodness. To them, there are constructive forces in the world that are being challenged by destructive ones. Their goal has been to stand their ground and choose to be good above all else. Even with those apparent differences, both paths have found homes within each of the world’s religions. As noted earlier, Hinduism offers the oneness path of Yoga, Judaism offers Kabbalah, Islam offers Sufism, Christianity offers Mysticism, and so on. Whatever the arrangement, the two paths have historically found ways to co-exist.

More muslims die from Islamist extremism than any other people. So don't you dare tell me, Islam is the same as Islamism! Islam is a people, Islamism is a sickness, just like Christianity is a people, Christian nationalism is a sickness - Hinduism is a people, Hindutva is a sickness - Atheism is a people, militant atheism is a sickness. And unless the peaceloving humans from each of these communities reach out to one another with a hand of integration, the nutcases from each of these communities will drag us all down the road of death and despair.

Reading the recipe of your grandma’s chicken soup will never compare to the taste. Seeing a magnificent sunset will never compare to somebody else’s description of that same sunset. Feeling the electrifying sensation of a passionate kiss will never compare to a second-hand account. Nothing replaces experience. If experience is at the heart of every religion, then theology points the way, practice gives us the vehicle, but we must take the steps if we want to personally explore our faith and reap experiences rather than rely solely on second-hand accounts.

With experience as their guiding light, Christian monks and nuns could, for example, come together with Sufis and Yogis to pray and meditate, then discuss their experiences by talking about how silence and inner peace have changed their lives, instead of talking about the content of their prayers or focusing on theology. Hindus, Christians, and Muslims, who tread the path of goodness, could come together and do good works. Doing good side by side would show them that they are not as different as previously thought and that their various beliefs can lead to similar outcomes.

Although the US State Department has not officially designated the MB [Muslin Brotherhood] as a terrorist organization, Egypt did so in 2013; and in 2015, a British government review “concluded that membership of or links to it should be considered a possible indicator of extremism.” However, in 2003 the FBI uncovered the MB’s multifaceted plan to dominate America through immigration, intimidation, education, community centers, mosques, political legitimacy, and establishing ‘interfaith dialogue’ centers in our universities and colleges. A document confiscated by the FBI outlines a twelve-point strategy to establish an Islamic government on earth that is brought about by a flexible, long-term ‘cultural invasion’ of the West. Their own plans teach us that ‘the intrusion of Islam will erupt in multiple locations using mulciple means’. But near the top of this strategy is immigration. To be more specific, the first major point in their strategy states; ‘To expand the Muslin presence by birth rate, immigration and refusal to assimilate.’ This strategy transformed Indonesia from a Buddhist and Hindu country to the largest Muslin-dominated country in the world. As Europe has discovered, open borders for refugees may be viewed as a compassionate response to a catastrophic humanitarian crisis, but it has long-term risks and consequences.

Islamophobia doesn't disappear simply because you choose to close your eyes. Can you stand by a dehumanized muslim, against the bigoted barbarians of your own culture, and speak out at the top of your voice and conviction - I am a muslim, just as much as I am a christian - I am a muslim, just as much as I am a jew - I am a muslim, just as much as I am a buddhist - hindu - or atheist? Can you? Because, until every threat to the welfare of the dehumanized humans actually, genuinely, internally feels like a threat to your own family, no phobia will ever come to an end - no hatred will ever face demise. Till every culture, every country, every corner of the planet, becomes our own culture, our own country, our own home, there is no peace, there will never be peace. And this, my friend, is called practical divinity, practical sufism, practical nondualism, and practical humanism. Or better yet, this is the ism beyond all isms - this is the ism that concerns the life, laughter and loveliness of the entire humankind - this - is humanity.

One young man who had a tattoo of a bumblebee on his arm (the symbol of his favorite reggae group) was identified as a gang member. The gang was identified as the "Killer Bee Gang." According to Department of Corrections records, the Killer Bees were a gang of one.

These six hundred bodies, in unmarked graves, lie in silent witness to a failed law-enforcement solution to a human problem, and to the low value the United States places on lives of vulnerable, poor people who are considered the "other.

When an individual is identified on the basis of religion or culture, renunciation means renouncing those beliefs. For many, their religion and culture provide the structure for them to reconstruct their lives. Renouncing these beliefs is not an option.

In his theorizaton of crisis racism under Thatcherism and in the France of an insurgent Front national, Etienne Balibar describes how the invocation of crisis licenses the ‘crossing of certain thresholds of intolerance […] which are generally turned on the victims themselves and described as thresholds of tolerance’ (Balibar and Wallerstein 1991: 219, italics in original). Establishing the intolerable is crucial to the exercise of racisms integral to but disavowed in national and European imaginaries (Blommaert and Verschueren 1998: 78). This preserves a hegemonic self-image of the tolerant acting intolerantly under duress: the 2004 redesignation of the wearing of the hijab in France as intrinsically an act of proselytization, the defence of the publication of the Jyllands Posten cartoons as an inclusive act of mockery, the objection to a Muslim cultural centre and ‘inter-faith prayer space’ near the former site of the World Trade Center in New York as an ‘assertion of Islamic triumphalism that we should not tolerate’ (see Pilkington 2010).

By themselves, Christian communities will not achieve this reconstituting of Christian faith. Assemblies of Jesus-followers that effectively challenge the political repression and existential anguish of today will be those which work alongside interfaith and inter-religious communities and also with secular peoples of conscience. If Christians work in this way, they will confront the tortured restlessness that Lockdown America sears into the bodies, hearts, and minds of U.S. peoples today. A still white supremacist system in the United States disseminates a domestic terror that reinforces corporate power and threatens us all, but predominantly and most brutally those in black, brown and other communities of color.

In the New World Order (a term partially coined by Tri-Lateralist president George H.W. Bush, a bedfellow with dangerous and intolerant Saudi Wahhabists) “political correctness” will increasingly demand “religious correctness.” Opposition to the interfaith and ecumenical agenda (championed in Evangelical circles by Chuck Colson and Rick Warren) will increasingly be legally viewed as a hate crime. This is all being controlled by the spirit of antichrist setting the stage for the arrival of the ultimate Antichrist.

people of diverse religions, spiritual expressions and indigenous traditions throughout the world, hereby establish the United Religions Initiative to promote enduring, daily interfaith cooperation, to end religiously motivated violence and to create cultures of peace, justice and healing for the Earth and all living beings.

Souls of Mercury illuminates us as to how we can empower all relationships, specifically with oneself, others and with the Ultimate Reality. The author invites us to awaken from the suffering illusion of life to the wisdom of the ages. —Sunder Arora M.D. FRCPC Adult and Child Psychiatrist, Interfaith Minister, Yoga Teacher. Author of” Ushering in Heaven” A psychiatrist prescription for Healing, Joy, and Spiritual awakening.

Many countries have accepted the Jews, … and always they have turned against them in the end. The Jews will only survive if they are strong. This is the lesson of history. … We were commanded to keep our faith. So let me tell you: every time a Jew marries out, we are weakened. Marry out, and in two, three generations, your family will not be Jewish. Maybe they will be safe, maybe not. But in the end, either way, all that we have will be lost.

stated above, the true self of all things in the whole world is atman/Brahman. Human beings do not realize their true self and assume that the material body, including physical body as well as mind, is the true self. That is ignorance (avidya). For Sankara, human predicament is caused by ignorance, not by sin. To be liberated, one must remove the ignorance, confusing one’s true self with something else. To remove the ignorance,

Interfaithism is more than religious solidarity in light of social change, it is politics wrapped in a veneer of spirituality.

a public event designed to be an interfaith dialogue between Muslims and Christians. Three preachers walked out in protest when Malcolm criticized the wealth of some African-American churches and the poverty of their worshippers.

If you are able to show goodness to yourself, your family, friends, and maybe to some in your community, you are doing better than most. In fact, it can be harder to show goodness to those who stand close to you than to those who are in faraway places. If more people tended to their own gardens, all of society would flourish as a result.

History has taught us that when understanding and tolerance are fostered, people of different faiths can live together in harmony. Regrettably, history has also taught us the opposite, that such states of equilibrium can quickly degenerate and succumb to rhetoric of anger and fear, sometimes leading to violence and even war. A balance of mutual respect and tolerance needs to be maintained through good works. Interrelations need continual nurturing.

It can be helpful to think of humanity like a pearl necklace. Each human being is a pearl with distinct characteristics, but underneath there is a string that ties us all together, invisible to the naked eye.