Religious intolerance: ‘Similarities must be highlighted, not differences’

LAHORE: Collective efforts are the need of the hour to counter religious intolerance in the world and extreme interpretation of religious texts is a threat to peace.

This was the crux of views expressed by experts at a three-day conference titled Building Bridges: Discovering the Foundations for Interreligious Harmony that concluded on Wednesday.

Around 60 scholars, academicians, intellectuals and diplomats associated with US-Pakistan Interreligious Consortium (UPIC) took part. The moot was co-sponsored by the University of Management and Technology (UMT), Lahore, Intersections International, Berkley Centre for Religion, Peace and World Affairs of Georgetown University, USA.

In the recommendations put forward by the speakers after three-day’s discussion, it was said that faith-based conflict, extremist narrative and religious intolerance was a big threat to peace and harmony in today’s world. Some so-called stereotypes and misconceptions regarding religion are the result of wrong interpretation of religious texts.

The speakers said that Islam, Christianity and Judaism were all Abrahamic religions.

The speakers suggested that similarities rather than differences of these religions needed to be highlighted.

Published in The Express Tribune, March 30^th, 2017.