SOME 500 CNMI and Guam residents joined the 5 million members of the Bah-’Î Faith communities around the world in an appeal against religious prejudice and fanaticism.
In a recent message to the world’s religious leaders, the Bah-’Î Faith’s international governing council decried the persistence of religious prejudice as a “barrier to global peace and prosperity.”
Dr. David Khorram, Bah-’Î spokesman in the CNMI, yesterday said the same message had been forwarded to the religious leaders in the commonwealth, urging them to “act decisively on the need to eradicate religious intolerance and fanaticism.”
“With every day that passes, danger grows that the rising fires of religious prejudice will ignite a worldwide conflagration the consequences of which are unthinkable,” writes the Universal House of Justice in the message to the world’s religious leaders.
According to the Universal House of Justice, prejudices based on gender, race or nationality have already been recognized as unacceptable by all thinking people.
Although they continue to exist in practice, “there is a strong ground swell toward their abolition.”
However, religious prejudice persists, triggering a crisis that should compel religious leaders to make a “break with the past as decisive as those that opened the way for society to address equally corrosive prejudices of race, gender and nation.”
The Bah-’Î community says it is willing to work for religious unity. “We owe it to our partners in this common effort, however, to state clearly our conviction that interfaith discourse, if it is to contribute meaningfully to healing the ills that afflict a desperate humanity, must now address honestly and without further evasion the implications of the over-arching truth that called the movement into being: that God is one and that, beyond all diversity of cultural expression and human interpretation, religion is likewise one.”
The Bah-’Î Faith is the most recent of the world’s independent monotheistic religions. Founded in 1844, it now has a worldwide population of 5 million.
