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“LOVE THY NEIGHBOR!” The importance of learning abo

Our civilization has an endless history of bloodshed in the name of what some believed was defending religious values—a history being created as painfully today as ever. Think of the medieval Christian Crusades, the Islamic conquest of Hispania (711-788), followed immediately by the Reconquista that ended only in 1492 with the fall of the last Islamic state at Granada, while the Ottoman empire was already practicing forceful conversion on the Balkans and the Europeans were to begin converting the indigenous population of the newly discovered continent. To all this we can add the continuous conflicts between Hindus and Muslims in Asia, the hopeless situation in the Middle East, Buddhism in Tibet regarded as an ideological and a political threat to communist China, and terrorism seen as a Holy War.


Hindu fanatics armed against Muslims

Hindu fanatics armed against Muslims

Some believe that all paths to God (a supreme being or the universal consciousness—whichever description we are comfortable with) are equally good and have the right to exist. I share that belief—with one qualification: as long as they lead to something constructive and not to something destructive. And here we already stumble over the fundamental problem. The moment we set a condition for accepting the belief of another we already reject it. The inherent human nature makes us feel stable, comfortable, and safe when we build our psyche and our lives upon the things we know. The unknown scares us. So what have people often done when they have encountered the unknown in history? They have tried to squeeze it into the mold of what they knew—to suit their own sense of safety and comfort. This quite simplistic described trait of human nature becomes enormously exaggerated and extremely important when it comes to religious (or anti-religious) beliefs, for they form the backbone of a person’s psyche, of a community’s life, of a culture, and frequently of law as well. When our inherent sense of feeling safe with what we know is transformed into an ideological belief—political or religious—we run the risk to believe that we are right. This belief is the foundation of the religious (and political) call for imposing one’s value system on another—the most harmful and most destructive phenomenon in the history of our civilization. Conversion, religious or other, could be one of the most beautiful inner spiritual processes an individual could experience. But forceful conversions are among the ugliest, most violent, and most inhuman ways people have treated people.


Does that mean that there is something wrong with sharing or with spreading religious beliefs? Certainly not! What I see as profoundly wrong is the expectation that others believe precisely in what we believe and the sense that we need to force them into our shoes. The big question then is—how to create an environment in which the constructive predominates and the destructive is (almost) eliminated. In other words, how do we make sure that in the world we live in we find more compassion and cooperation than hate, conflict, and destruction? I suggest that the key in this task is understanding what understanding means.


The Crusades


We cannot negotiate a peace agreement or a trade deal without understanding the other side. Nor can we have a happy marriage without understanding our partner. In order to stop fighting for existence and start coexisting peacefully and maybe happily, we have to start understanding each other better. Easy to say! Well … Can we understand anything we do not know? Knowing about something is the very first premise for understanding it. How much do we know about other cultures? About other religions? About another person? And how willing are we to leave our comfort zone of the known and to venture into exploring the unknown? We do not have to become converts in order to understand the views and beliefs of others. But there is one thing we cannot do without. There is a popular instruction in the Christian Gospel: “Love thy neighbor as thyself.” It sounds lovely, but there is a confusion I see here. What does love mean and who is our neighbor?



In the Western Greco-Christian tradition there are several words for love, each representing a different aspect. One of those aspects emphasizes the need of a human to make connection—to another human or to the divine. If we realize that we cannot pick and choose who the neighbor is but instead embrace the reality that our neighbor is everyone walking on this earth, and if we try to connect to our neighbors, to learn about them, then we will find that the beliefs we have in common are more than the beliefs that separate us from each other. Finding out about others and trying to understand them is a way that might lead to real, peaceful, and compassionate coexistence—rather than hate and destruction, amongst which we wave the flag of religious tolerance, without actually knowing much about the people and the ideas we want to tolerate.




Gandhi and Nehru in a conversation


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