Hello Dalai

If Judaism is dedicated to making the world a better place for all, Islam calls on believers to lead an honorable and dignified life in the service of God, and Christianity is about brotherly love, tolerance and forgiveness, please explain why so many fundamental adherents of each faith believe they are justified in attacking and killing followers of one or more of the other religions (or even different sects within their own faith)? Whether it is Boko Haram church bombings in Nigeria (with vengeful reprisals), a murderous assault on an American consulate in Benghazi, Sunni car bombings against Shiites in Baghdad, Israeli shelling and bombing of innocent civilians in southern Lebanon to get at the militants imbedded in their mix, a coordinated attack against buildings filled with innocents on 9/11/01… well this list could go on for pages and pages… “I’m right and you’re wrong” or “If you don’t believe you are less than me and I can kill you for your own good” religion seems to be one of the greatest source of violent death on earth.

If the Pope proselytizes peace among nations, he does so from his religious perspective, but Catholics through the ages (Spanish Inquisition, Crusades, the battle in Northern Ireland) have engaged in many murderous if religiously-justified conflicts. If the head of the Russian Orthodox Church demands President Vladimir Putin’s support of the cruel Assad regime in Syria, it is because he wants to protect the Christian minority there from Islamists with murder on the minds – which minority Assad continues to protect – regardless of the cost in human lives in the rest of the country. The Evangelical movement is firmly committed to a strong and powerful Israel out of a notion that the Second Coming will only emanate from the prophecy of Armageddon that will generate from an ultra-violent all-out war in the Holy Land. And if some extreme Muslim cleric issues a fatwah against a practitioner of legally permissible free speech in an entirely different nation thousands and thousands of miles away, with adherents admonished to implement an order to kill the offender, how can we expect global peace and harmony?

So from this cacophony of violent religiosity comes a calm voice from a supreme religious prelate – the Tibetan Buddhist Dalai Lama – who tells us that perhaps the world cannot find global peace and calm togetherness through religion and that too much of global conflict is in fact generated by the most reverent in pursuit of their religious commitments... that there must be a path “beyond religion” where cohesive harmony can be achieved on an entirely different level.

“All the world’s religions, with their emphasis on love, compassion, patience, tolerance, and forgiveness can and do promote inner values. But the reality of the world today is that grounding ethics in religion is no longer adequate. This is why I am increasingly convinced that the time has come to find a way of thinking about spirituality and ethics beyond religion altogether,” says the Dalai Lama in his 2011 book, Beyond Religion: Ethics for the Whole World.

He doesn’t negate the needs and goals of religions around the world, but points out that for religious morality to prevail sufficiently to represent a solution to global harmony would require that one core religion replace the diversity of belief we have today, a seemingly impossible occurrence. “‘Any religion-based answer to the problem of our neglect of inner values can never be universal, and so will be inadequate. What we need today is an approach to ethics which makes no recourse to religionand can be equally acceptable to those with faith and those without: a secular ethics,’ he wrote.” Huffington Post, September 13^th. In short, there is a commonality of ethical and moral precepts that are in all faiths and thus transcend any one faith to become the global values that could, theoretically, lead us all to global harmony… assuming such a feat were remotely possible.

There are those who argue that violence in the world – man’s killing man in murder and through combat – is just a tool of nature administering population control over a species that has no known superior predators… so we become our own predators. We have no choice they say. It is a harsh view that reduces mankind to numbers and macro-genomic programming, denying the humanity of moral choice. I think I like the Dalai Lama’s suggestions better, however remote and idealistic they may be. We really do need to embrace “something else,” because the cruelty that repels most of us seems only to be growing. What are your thoughts?

I’m Peter Dekom, and looking at the state of the planet, I truly do want a better world for my son, his wife and the generations to come.