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Interreligious Dialogue and Its Moral Limits

Jan. 24 2017

Reviewing Ephraim Meir’s Interreligious Theology: Its Value and Mooring in Modern Jewish Philosophy, Peter Berger launches into a discussion of the extent to which religious faith can accommodate pluralism. Berger praises the idea of the book’s title—interfaith cooperation that goes beyond mere dialogue—but argues that such attempts to transcend religious differences should go only so far:

John Hicks (1922-2012), the British Protestant theologian who wrote influential books about interreligious dialogue, created a very telling metaphor: we need a “Copernican revolution” in theology—instead of looking at the earth/our own faith as the center around which everything revolves, we should see our faith as one of several planets revolving around the sun of ultimate reality. Each planet provides an instructive perspective on that reality.

It is a very attractive picture, but it leaves out one possibility—that some planets may not look at the sun at all, but are facing away from it. If all perspectives are equally true, there is no truth at all. I think that such sharp alternatives appear in . . . the dialogue . . . between the perceptions of reality emerging from the religious experience of the Indian subcontinent and the perceptions of the monotheistic faiths that originated in the Middle East. Still, I want to emphasize that this dialogue, too, could occur [amicably].

But there could be a rather less amicable reason for saying “no” to a dialogue—a moral reason. This could be . . . because one wants to have nothing to do with the putative interlocutor: I don’t think I would want to enter into dialogue with whatever degenerate imams legitimate the hell on earth being instituted by Islamic State in the areas it controls in Iraq and Syria. Or suppose there still survived the cult of human sacrifice that existed in Mesoamerica in pre-Colombian times. Imagine, say, that a delegation of Aztec theologians were welcomed to an interreligious conference at the World Council of Churches in Geneva: “Thank you very much for coming to this conference. We are greatly looking forward to hearing your paper explaining why the gods have to be fed by the blood of sacrificial victims. . . .”

Read more at American Interest

More about: Idolatry, Interfaith dialogue, ISIS, Jewish Thought, Relativism, Religion

The Summary: 10/7/20

Two extraordinary events demonstrate something important about Israel’s most fervent adversaries. One was a speech given at something called The People’s Forum (funded generously by Goldman Sachs), which stated, “When the state of Israel is finally destroyed and erased from history, that will be the single most important blow we can give to destroying capitalism and imperialism.”

The suggestion that this tiny state is the linchpin of a global, centuries-old phenomenon like capitalism goes well beyond anything resembling rational criticism. Even if Israel were guilty of genocide, apartheid, and oppression—which of course it is not—it would not follow that its destruction would help end capitalism or imperialism.

The other was an anti-Israel protest that took place in front of New York City’s Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center, deemed “complicit” in Israel’s evils. At organizers’ urging, participants shouted their slogans at kids in the cancer ward, who were watching from the windows. Given Hamas’s indifference toward the lives of Gazan children, such callousness toward non-Palestinian children from Hamas’s Western allies shouldn’t be surprising. The protest—like the abovementioned speech—deliberately conveyed the message that Israel is the ultimate evil and its destruction the ultimate good, cancer patients be damned.

The fact that Israel’s adversaries are almost comically perverse does not mean that they can be dismissed. If its allies fail to understand the obsessive and irrational hatred that it faces, they cannot effectively help it defend itself.

Read more at Mosaic