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On October 17 1979 Mother Teresa of Calcutta in India was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize “for work undertaken in the struggle to overcome poverty and distress which also constitute a threat to peace”. Had it been now would she have tried to overcome terror that is fuelled by religious hostilities?
She declared in her prize acceptance speech that “I feel the greatest destroyer of peace today is abortion, because it is a direct war, a direct killing- direct murder by mother himself-, .Because if a mother can kill her own child –what is left for me is to kill you and you kill me-there is nothing between {http:// nobelprize.org/peace/ laureates/1979/teresa- lecture.html}
If that laureate would still be alive now then she would have said that the greatest hindrance to peace today is terror, because terrorists do plan to eliminate the person they fear or hate. They are actually so intimate with death that they do not seem to love life. They do not operate by the rules and are willing, if necessary to die to deliver their explosives to their target and they do not care who dies with them. Indeed there seem to be no physical protection against these terrorists who are bedevilling our world.
With the assumption that the western world is Christian while most of the nations allegedly being forced to adopt democratic governance are Islamic or do belong to the eastern, or even traditional religions, then religion becomes the main world problem.
In August this year, president Bush of America used terms like”Islamic fascists” for both Hezbollah and the suspected bomb plotters who were held in London. The same week, during a press conference in his ranch in taxes, he said that “terrorists try to spread their jihadist message- a message I call---Islamic radicalism, Islamic fascism”.
Those statements offended a vast majority of moderate Muslims. To their defence, it may be true that there is nothing Islamic about the fascism of terrorists.
It’s true that the UN which is presently the supreme world body does not favour or oppress any religion. Indeed the UN and the US relieved the Muslims from the Christian oppression in the Yugoslavia in the 1990s. As a matter of fact, the US has put it in its Bill of Rights, Amendment I that “congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion or prohibiting the free exercise thereof.”
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This law that does not respect or prohibit religion is becoming the best recipe for peace in a word which is bedevilled by the debacle of religious hostilities.
Barely a decade ago, in December 1998, a brawl in Poso, one of the islands of Indonesia, led to months of religious violence in which hundreds died. Poso is in central Sulawesi, the fourth largest Indonesian island which has 80% Muslims and 17% Christian residents.
In July this year the Hezbollah’s attack on Israel caused hostilities in Lebanon and caused hundreds of deaths and injuries on both sides. Infrastructure experienced extensive damage and several persons were internally displaced.
On 9th October this year, North Korea bravely made its first nuclear test in defiance of the will of the international community. It provocatively showed -off its possession of weapons of mass destruction.
Laureate Teresa’s solution to the current problem that is robbing the peace would be ecumenism.she once said that,”there is only one God and he is God to all, therefore it is important that everyone is seen as equal before God. I’ve always said we should help a Hindu become a better Hindu, a Muslim become a better muslim, a catholic become a better catholic. She offered her work in the missionary of charity organisation as an example of the benefit of ecumenism. She said that “we have among us 475 souls -30 families are catholics, and the rest are all Hindus, Muslims, Sikhs-all different religions. But they all come to our prayers.{http://www.newadvent.org/cathen/1513a.htm}
After series of serious wars and rumors of wars which have presumed religions overtones, world leaders should be now thinking of gifting the chaotic and insecure world with peace premised on one world with one creed.
This automatically calls for all religions of the world to borrow a leaf from the hindus whose supreme being has already said that in whatsoever way men approach me, even so do I receive them, for even the paths men take from every side are mine. {Gita IV, 11}. This has made Hindus to peacefully co-exist with other religions by not lobbying for more members. Lobbying is among others what causes religious hostilities.
To Christians this does not come as a surprise but as a fulfilment of the scripture that says work while it is still day time because night will come (Amos 8:11-12). When the night is already due then the believers of those scriptures should accept to down their tools and accept the dictates of its fulfilment. The pope Benedict who recently inadvertently offended Muslims in his speech in Germany should realize that it is time to embrace the post Vatican II Catholicism. This catholism states in part that, Islam, Hinduism,Buddhism, Judaism, and any other religion which seek to help humans to overcome their sense of alienation from ultimate realities are all valid a venues to salvation.