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Question 11: Values and CultureShould Canada seek out opportunities for fostering global intercultural dialogue
and interfaith understanding? |
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| Contributor: | 1838 |
| Date: |
2003-04-30 19:21:44 |
| Answer: |
| Canada is home to people of every ethnic group, language and religion on earth. This could be a resource that could be enormously helpful in building bridges all over the world. And it may be useful to start building these bridges now. Demographers state that the two fastest growing religions in the world are a charismatic, pentalcostal, fundamentalist Christianity and a fundamentalist, expansionary Islam. These two religions are now butting up agaist each other in Africa, the far east and South Asia. The friction is already noticeable, and the prosepcts of these two forces coming into head to head confrontation with each other over much of the globe in the coming decades are disquietening. It raises the specter of the war of civilizations being fomented by Osama bin Laden. In Canada we have the possiblity of working with both of these faith groups, and with many others as well. By working together in an atmosphere of tolerance and understanding, might be possible to have people from these faith traditions in Canada exercise a moderating influence on their brothers and sisters in the faith in other parts of the world? Canada could and should explore the possibilities of this kind of intervention. We could be doing ourselves and the global community a huge favor if we could promote the kind of interfaith dialogue that will keep people talking to each other. Promoting this kind of dialogue might be part of making our export of a civil society our leading export. |
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