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AFDD Aims for
Change Through Exploration of Many Religious Perspectives
The Asia Faiths
Development Dialogue, in its second year, brought
together people from different religious faiths and
different professions from different parts (too many
different) of the world in one to share a ideas
about how common discussion among people with
varying beliefs can achieve peace, cooperation and
harmony in Asia and today's world.
This year’s conference
entitled “Building Peace, Cooperation and Harmony
Through Inter-Faiths Dialogue” took place on October
17 and built upon the AFDD’s first conference held
in December 2006 by adding in the concept of
cooperation.
“This dialogue is needed
because, despite countless intersections, the worlds do not
meet comfortably and we are still groping to find bridges,”
said Katherine Marshall, who is involved in the World Faiths
Development Dialogue and served as former adviser to the
World Bank president, in her keynote remarks. “The
vocabulary, the images and stories, and the intellectual
constructs of different worlds, can be very discordant and
seem far removed. But in reality they overlap and are
intertwined.”
The conference addressed this
issue of cooperation – or as Marshall put it, “building
bridges” – as well as the ideas of peace and harmony in
three plenary sessions. The first looked at Cambodian
perspectives, the second took a regional and international
point of view, while the third explored what inter-faiths
dialogue will lead to in the future.
Representatives of Cambodian
Islamic, Protestant and Buddhist faiths in the first session
all highlighted education as the most important means of
promoting peace, cooperation and harmony among the different
religious sects.
The panelists of the second
session reiterated the need for education and called for
religious leaders to disseminate ideas of peace and
cooperation among their followers. At the heart of this,
said Jose de Venecia, Jr., is the need for people with
different ideas to begin talking to one another.
“There cannot be peace among
nations unless there’s peace among religions. There cannot
be peace among religions unless there’s dialogue,” he said.
In the third session, the
panelists took different perspectives on how to take the
efforts of the AFDD in a forward moving direction in
resolving world conflicts. Chou Bun Eng, Secretary of State
to the Ministry of Interior, pointed out that people can use
their similarities to understand their differences, while
Tepsakha Khi Sovanratana, Vice Director at Preah Sihanuraja
University, pointed out that Buddhists believe that world
peace cannot be achieved without peace within individuals.
Overall, the panelists had a
common consensus that the diversity of faiths and cultures
need to be preserved and valued, especially in the changing
landscape of the 21st century. As Marshall
mentioned, the inter-faiths movement is becoming a global
trend seen on the regional, national and international
levels.
“The modern interfaith movement
largely reflects changes linked to modernization and
globalization,” she said. “First, one’s religion today, in
most modern societies, is not a simple given, an inherited
identity, and second, religions are far more intertwined
today, with different groups living together all over the
world, than they generally were in the past. Thus, a
product of modernization is the emergence of plural
societies and interfaith work is one avenue to address the
implications of this vast social change.”
The goal of AFDD is to bring
that global movement to a more regional level in Asia.
“We hope that it will be an additional tool and provide a
different perspective using faith based understanding
to help develop a culture of peace,” coordinator Bandol Lim
said.
According to Samrang Kamsan,
moderator of session one and the initiator of this forum for
dialogue, peace and development are directly linked.
“Without peace, there is no
development,” he said. “We would like to ask interfaith
groups to educate about peace to work toward harmony in
society so we have no more conflicts.”
The AFDD will convene in a third
conference, but that date has yet to be determined.
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