World Religion Day
| January 20, 2009 |
Making headlines in the UK recently was the atheist bus campaign. In response to the seeming abundance of religious messages of hell and damnation, atheists across the country raised 50,000 GBP to place banners on seven London buses with the message There’s probably no God. Now stop worrying and enjoy your life.
It is all too often that religion is associated with personal strife, violence and war rather than freedom, joy and social cohesion. In a New Kind of Christian Brian McLaren has one of his characters discuss the origins of the word religion, “The old Latin roots of the word simply mean ‘reconnecting,’ you know - broken ligaments being reconnected and defragmented. That sounds like exactly what we need, don’t you think? We’re ‘deligamented’, disconnected, fragmented people who need to be ‘religamented’, reconnected, put back together with God, with one another, reintegrated with ourselves, reconnected to the world we are a part of.”
World Religion Day provides an opportunity to reveal all the potential religion has to offer our broken and disconnected world and to allow positive rather than negative associations to be formed.
Join it: Most local communities have some kind of inter-faith network for leaders of different faith communities to share, pray together and work together. Get involved. If your community doesn’t have one, start one!
Host it: Host a faith dinner and invite people and leaders from the local churches, mosques and temples. Use it to celebrate the contribution of religion to society and to embark on a deeper journey with those with different faiths.
Do it: All the major religions have some form of ‘the golden rule’, in Christianity it is ‘do unto others as you would have others do unto you’. Why not get together with locals of other faiths and commission some form of mural or garden art for your community that promotes this golden rule?
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