People sometimes can be found to be debating as to how this can be achieved! I thought about this for a while and in the course of my journey through life encountering various situations, meeting many people, listening and reading to a lot of people I think one does not need to think about ways of achieving inter-religious harmony. It had dawned upon me that one simply needs to understand the meaning of religion better and the inter-religious harmony, as we would like to call, follows in automatically.
Let us consider a man wanting to change to a certain religion X. What does he do? How does he go about doing it? Let us just cook up an imaginary process of his conversion into the religion of X. He goes to some committee or some head of that religion and puts forward his wishes. He is welcomed and told to follow some of the cultural norms of that religion. He changes his name, changes his looks and starts learning the scriptures of that religion in order to facilitate his conversion into that religion.
Days later you see him all dressed up looking like a typical man of the X religion. You see him greet you in a style typical to that religion. He has to remind you that he has to be called by his new name which was given to him by the religious heads who prescribed the procedure for his conversion process. He has started visiting a specific place of worship. To put in simple and short phrase, he is doing everything that most people of the same religion X are usually found doing.
Now, the important of all questions! Has he really “converted” into the “religion” X? Some of you might choose to answer this question as a simple “Yes”. But I would like to pose several more questions before I can convince myself whether the person in question has really converted into the religion of X! Perhaps in the course of these questions, you will come to know what I think about “religion”.
The man has a thousand defects before joining this new X religion. Over the course of his transformation, how many defects has he gotten rid of? Has he managed to bring down these 1000 to even 995? Does each day of reading the scriptures, each visit to the holy monument and each day of ritual reduce this number from 995 to 990 and then onwards to lesser and lesser? Does each of the above make the smile on his face broader? Does it make him happy on the inside? Does he start becoming a better husband? Does he get rid of his jealousies? Does he get rid of his obsessions? Does it help him control his actions? Does it make him more charitable? Does it make him peaceful?
Has this man reached a point where suppose he is locked inside a room and told that he will not be allowed to go to that monument today, does he say “I do not care for my happiness is in me and does not reside in the monument.”? Say, he is denied to read his scriptures; does he smile and say “All the scriptures are in me! Their essence is in me. Their message is in me!” Say he is made to remove all the attire that “defined” him as a member of the X religion, he smiles and says, “If it makes you happy, go ahead. But my religion is in me, it is my strength, it is my happiness and it is happiness that is inside me and not this piece of cloth.” Further on does he say, “I am progressing! Progress is not in my clothes and my looks but progress is inside me. How can you stop progress when it is inside me?”?
I hope these questions have been more than enough to elucidate what I believe religion is. We are wasting our time and energy when we seek the name, the monument and the attire in defining a religion. Religion should be a journey towards inner peace and strength. What’s in name and form? Member of any religion, if he has found this via his practices should be able to recognize the same in any other person who has found them. Would it then matter how he found them? The fact is that if he has found them, he is on his way.
I believe there is only one step that can bring about inter-religious harmony – understanding religion for what it really is and what it is meant to give.