Challenges in interreligious dialogs

By B.S. Mardiatmadja

The following is an excerpt of a paper to be delivered next week at a seminar in Oegstgeest, the Netherlands. The seminar, Religious Plurality and Nationalism in Indonesia, is organized by the Netherlands chapter of the Association of Indonesian Moslem Intellectuals. This is the first of two articles.

JAKARTA (JP): The essence of dialog among people of different beliefs is identical to the essence of dialog on the core element of development of a national vision.

Why? Because a national vision is the way a nation looks at its future and how to reach that future.

And this is exactly the main essence of democracy. In principle, democracy supports the freedom, equality and fraternity of citizens.

One person is equal to another simply because of their basic humanity. One's religious, racial or caste identity becomes secondary in relation to one's fundamental rights and freedoms.

A community may have an ideology it claims to be independent of any religious affiliation but the reality may not be so.

This tension between reality and ideology provides an incentive to reform or transform the facts in order to conform to the ideology.

There are at least four obstacles to a dialog: prejudice, secularism, fundamentalism and communalism.

Prejudice often has its roots in ignorance. Many of us are accustomed to living in a community that is highly compartmentalized.

This means that as a member of a religion's community, many of us are living in a world of more or less our own.

We are often ignorant of the beliefs and practices of other people. The void left by ignorance is filled by prejudice. This may be transmitted from generation to generation.

Another person's faith is simply regarded as nonexistent and there is no reason to have a relationship with that person. One is ready to believe every rumor, and in Indonesia, there are a lot of rumors.

Religious diversity is recognized, but it is not always perceived in the same way by various adherents of religion.

Secularism may be manifested among some well-educated Indonesians. Religion is often privatized, or else exploited as a political tool.

Provided one is faithful to the law of the land, one is left along to hold whatever belief one wishes.

The danger here is that deprived of its religious base, moral principles in public life fall prey to self-interest, efficiency, success, economic growth, profit motive and others.

Fundamentalism is a narrow affirmation of the truth of one's beliefs. The others may not be considered insincere, but deluded. No distinction is made between religion and morality, nor between what is moral and what is legal.

A mild form of fundamentalism sees in religion the cementing force between people and tries to promote a state religion. Many religions have smaller groups of active fundamentalists.

They confuse religion and society and faith and polities too quickly. A milder form of fundamentalism may show itself in a self-sufficient attitude that has eyes only for what is lacking in others.

God is perfect, but however perfect the object of our faith may be, our own understanding, expression and practice of it is culturally and historically conditioned and limited.

An awareness of such limitations would keep us more open to receive as much as to give in the process of encounter.

A similar difficulty arises when religions do realize that there are symbolic elements (analogical element) in all languages about God (Wirtgenstein).

Ongoing reinterpretation to make the original memory relevant to contemporary reality is necessary to make religion historically pertinent.

Communalism believes that people who share the same religious beliefs also share the same economic and political interests. Hence, it seeks to turn the religious community into a political power block.

While communalism may be also based on other factors like race, language and others, religious communalism seems to be the most dangerous, because it uses all the emotional power of faith, which has an absolute character, to support its struggle for political power.

It would be difficult to speak of a national community. Communalism degrades religion, by making it a political tool. Dialog is becoming more difficult.

If dialog is to be more than merely the casual, superficial acknowledgement of others' views about God and the world, if it is to be a real conversation (which is what dialog means), then it cannot be among "the religions" but among the people of various religious traditions. Dialog is essentially a personal as well as a structural event. It is very complex.

But despite its complexity, antireligious dialog is the real signature of our time.

Authenticity, truth and truthfulness have become the essential elements for contemporary antireligious dialog.

Dialog is a human process to be honestly social. In many official meetings in politics and economics, as well as in a lot of religious communities, tactics and hidden agendas very often determine the allegedly unbiased dialog atmosphere.

But it is authenticity that qualifies interreligious dialog as personal encounters. Authenticity is understood here as "truth, that is, honesty with oneself and others" and the interactive depending of one's relationship to oneself, the world and God.

The writer is a Catholic priest and lecturer on philosophy at the STF Driyarkara, Jakarta.