A little proselytising for (keen)

Submitted by A (Keen) Student of Islam (India), Jun 2, 2005 at 05:08

I could neither read comments nor respond to the one from Vic Coffey – "A little proselytising for (keen)" – since I was away in Egypt. I would here presume this comment refers to something I wrote ("keen"), but I fail to see where I had implied the superiority of one faith over the next. And, as far as I know, there is nothing monolithic called Hinduism, which makes proselytization – however "little" - to Hinduism an absurdity!

ALL ‘Faith', according to me, is irrational and will progressively be replaced by ‘Reason', a process that some people mistakenly attribute to volatility. Actually, it is inevitability – not volatility or dynamism. No faith today can be "enlightened", it may perhaps once have been, in the circumstances of its advent.

Also, every faith has its "bright folks". So there is no question of saying that one faith has all the bright ones, leaving none for the others! The presumed brightness of those folks depends not so much on whether or not their faith is enlightened. How rationally they are willing to question, challenge and demolish untenable dogma of their respective faiths is what really matters. This is especially significant in the case of "bright" followers of those faiths that have exclusivity, intolerance and contempt for other persuasions as immutable tenets.

Willingness "to accept the fact that some folks can't be convinced" would qualify as ‘enlightenment' only when unchangeable opinions held by ideologues had no ramifications beyond themselves. With fundamentalist Islam and Christianity, sadly, this appears not to be the case. A true belief in either is impossible unless EVERY OTHER VIEW is annihilated.

Such enlightenment, foolish enough to willingly put its neck on the chopping block, might make a lemming blush!

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