Click on the title of this post, or here to visit the website of the "Pave the Way Foundation", an organization that stands for faith, but against any extremist elements that would threaten each others religious and civil rights. There message is powerful:
Pave the Way Foundation is dedicated to achieving peace by closing the gap in tolerance, education and the practical relations between religions, through cultural, technological and intellectual exchanges. We strive to eliminate the use of religion as a tool which, historically has been used, by some, to achieve personal agendas and to cause conflicts.
Through our inter-religious projects of identification and elimination of obstacles and our concrete gestures of good will, we utilize our earned level of trust, in order to "pave the way" towards improving inter-religious relations and by encouraging intra-religious relations. We task the faithful of all beliefs that the true danger to international peace is the extremists that exist within every faith.
Pave the Way Foundation is committed to ending religious hatred and intolerance by removing the tool of “religion” from those who will use it for malevolent purposes. We have taken and continue to take decisive steps to educate the every day person. We promote projects which have demonstrated enormous historic gestures of good will. When the “silent majority” learns the truth, they will act rationally, rethink past hatreds, oppose stereotypical lies and act with tolerance for their fellow man.
We hope to motivate the every day person not to just sit there and say "tsk, tsk, tsk" after reading their morning paper - do something! Your life, your family, and the survival of the whole human race may very well be at stake.
One must be careful not to trust everything they read in the paper or see on television. We encourage everyone to seek out the unbiased facts about any story before rendering an opinion. Mark Twain once wrote "If you do not read newspapers you are uninformed. If you do read newspapers you are misinformed."
The philosophy of how we have achieved our successes at PTWF can be summed up in this fact of problem solving: "If there is a problem somewhere, this is what happens. Three people will try to do something concrete to settle the issue. Ten people will give a lecture analyzing what the three are doing. One hundred people will condemn or commend the ten for their lecture. One thousand people will argue about the problem. And one-person -only one- will involve himself so deeply in the true solution that he is too busy to listen to any of it."
Fr. Elias Chacour- Israeli Priest and First Palestinian to graduate Hebrew University
"The world is not dangerous because of those who do harm but because of those who look at it without doing anything."
– Albert Einstein, physicist
Embrace our similarities Savor our differences.
The meaning of our slogan is simple. We must embody the messages of charity, love, and responsibility for every human being, common to all of our faiths, our beliefs and to the code of human behavior. We focus on our similarities and savor our differences by learning, through the positive and practical appreciation of the World's diverse religions and beliefs. We must not allow the differences to poison us, with bigotry, hatred, and intolerance. Instead, we wish to learn, enhance our own beliefs and in turn savor our differences.
Thank you for your wonderful cooments on our work. Sometimes the road we must take has many bumps, but we ignore these to achieve our goal to take religion away from those who use it as a tool to achieve their private agenda.
ReplyDeleteGary Krupp