thinktoomuch.net

Today was Pluralism Sunday. Initiated by the Center for Progressive Christianity, Pluralism Sunday is an interfaith effort celebrating religious pluralism, a term used to describe the acceptance of all religious paths and promoting their coexistence (some words borrowed from wikipedia as usual). A part of the first paragraph from the Pluralism Sunday website:

On the first Sunday in May- this year, May 1, 2011 – (or other times during the year) churches around the world dedicate their worship to a celebration of our interfaith world. Progressive Christians thank God for religious diversity! We don’t claim that our religion is superior to all others. We recognize that other religions can be as good for others as ours is for us. We can grow closer to God and deeper in compassion—and we can understand our own traditions better—through a more intimate awareness of the world’s religions.

I love the idea, and am very supportive of the effort. With the diversity of worldviews we have, and the cultural inertia of worldviews — strongly tied to geography, extremely few people convert worldviews in their lifetimes — it is a fact of life that we need to learn to coexist for the foreseeable future. Who knows where we will all be a couple of thousand years from now (if we, as a species, are still alive), but for the next hundred years at least, embracing pluralism is effectively non-negotiable, assuming we want some global cooperation. Just consider this flash map showing the historical spread of the five largest religions:

I stole this from one of Dale’s blog post about religion in education, in which he raves about the teaching of religions “in the essential plural” in Georgia schools (Georgia the US state). So I might as well steal another paragraph of his, containing caveats about this animation:

Even this required supplementing, of course. For one thing, I had to point out that the grey areas certainly had beliefs of their own before they were subsumed into one or another of the corporate faiths, and that not everyone in a given color believes the same. I, for example, am not (at least in this respect) blue.

What I would like to point out in particular: the five largest religions did manage to spread impressively over the globe, over thousands of years. They did thereby largely replace other religions in those regions. However the borders between these five big religions did not change particularly significantly. This ought to give you some sense that these religions will be sticking around for the foreseeable future, even though our modern travel, communications and trade in information has made the exchange of ideas much easier and quicker than before.

If we operate on a global scale, we undeniably have to accept some pluralism, at least as far as our lives are concerned. Thus my wholehearted support of efforts that embrace pluralism, that promote cross-cultural understanding and acceptance, that enable cooperation.

What tipped me off to Pluralism Sunday was a tweet by John Shuck. He is one of the handful of preachers/pastors/theologians I enjoy following on Twitter, I’ll be getting back to him. His blog post about Pluralism Sunday also copied the same first paragraph I did (though he went for the whole thing), and shared what they would be up to today, at FPC Elizabethton. Another tweet from John Shuck about an hour ago:

Whenever I get to play, “I Love You and Buddha Too” in church, it is a good day.

Amen.

There is a list of participating churches – I count around 60, from various US states, Canada, Australia, New Zealand and Hong Kong.