Does America Have a Muslim Problem?

Does America Have a Muslim Problem?

Chen Su Lan Education Centre Official Opening June 24, 2010

On the eve of Poson Poya Day which celebrates the 2318th Anniversary of the entry of Buddhism to Sri Lanka, the Chen Su Lan Education Centre in Vavuniya was officially opened.

Special guests for the even were Mrs P M Charles (Government Agent and District Secretary), Mr S N G Nathan of the Tamil National Alliance party and the elected Mayor of Vavuniya (Chairman of the Urban Council), Brigadier Napagoda (Representing Major General Kamal Gunaratna), Police Chief Senaratne, Religious leaders from the Buddhist, Christian, Muslim and Hindu communities.

Close to one hundred Singapore Buddhist pilgrims from the Maha Karuna Society included this in the itinerary of their pilgrimage led by Venerable K Gunaratana. They offered gifts to the monks, students and people in the community. More than one thousand were present and it far exceeded the expectations of the organizers.

When Venerable Gunaratana and I visited Manik Farm to offer relief supplies to the camp of the teenage soldiers of the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam, we saw immediately the need to prepare for the re-entry of the youths to continue their education which was interrupted by the civil war. In discussing with Major General Gunaratna the proposal to set up an education centre was agreed upon.

Application was made to the Government Agent/District Secretary to offer a piece of land in the city of Vavuniya for this project. This was approved and more than half an acre of empty land was given for the construction of the Education Centre.


Chen Su Lan Trust underwrote the entire cost of the building. The building works started and within a short period of two and half months the Chen Su Lan Education Centre was officially declared open on June 24, 2010.

This project is an important one which will further the process of reconciliation after thirty years of tragic civil war between the Sinhalese and the Tamil people. Peace must prevail and reconciliation must take place.

At the Opening Ceremony we have portrayed this dimension of reconciliation. Madam Charles is the Government Service and she is a Tamil Catholic, Mayor Charles is a member of Tamil National Alliance Party that supported Tamil Eelam, Brigadier Napagoda and Police Chief Senaratne are Sinhalese Buddhists, Singapore pilgrims are Chinese who embrace the Sinhalese Theravada Buddhism. Venerable Gunaratana is a Sinhalese Buddhist monk working in Singapore for over 15 years and committed to help the Tamils who are from Hindu, Christian, Muslim faith communities. I am a Malaysian Chinese Christian who has been working in Singapore for the past 45 years. The Chen Su Lan Trust is a Christian family philanthropic trust fund helping people of all races, religions and nationalities.

The inter-national and inter-religious factors were well symbolized. Flags of both Singapore and Sri Lanka were fluttering side by side. The two national anthems were sung at the beginning, The symbolic lamp was lit by representatives of different communities. We light the lamps to dispel the darkness of ignorance and conflict. We raise the vision of hope and peace with justice for all.

The Chen Su Lan Education Centre will ultimately belong to the people of Vavuniya. Together they will use the Centre to engage in religious dialogue for mutual understanding and respect for differences among the faith communities. Together they will educate the people and empower them in community service for peace and harmony.

It is our hope that this interfaith Centre will encourage other communities far and near to involve in the process of reconciliation and seek the welfare of society.

MINISTRY OF DEFENCE, Public Security, Law & Order Sri Lanka News Release

Last modified on: 6/10/2010 3:57:28 PM


SINGAPORE MEDICAL TEAM TREATS RESETTLED MANNAR CIVILIAN
[June 10 2010]

Members of the Maha Karuna Buddhist Society with a team of 28 Singaporean Medical Officers and assistants offered their generosity to hundreds of resettled Tamil people in Mannar and its suburbs by conducting a special medical clinic during June 7 - 8 at Adampan Rural Hospital, Mannar. Chen Su Lan Trust and Dr Bishop Yap, Singapore have also extended the support for the project in Sri Lanka.

Ven Karadetiyana Gunarathana Thero, Religious Advisor, Singapore-based Maha Karuna Buddhist Society and the Chief Coordinator for the medical clinic project in Sri Lanka is scheduled to conduct such services elsewhere in Wanni also within next few days and also on account of forthcoming Poson festival.

The medical clinic attracted a large number of civilians, both young and old as well as school students in the area, following prior information given to schools by the Army. Members of the Maha Karuna Buddhist Society also served lunch and refreshments to all those who approached the clinic on both days. In addition, a large stock of medicine and other medical requirements were also given away to the sick free of charge. Singaporeans volunteered to prepare meals for the participants in the project and enjoyed serving foods while interacting with them.

Brigadier M.A.M Dias, Area Commander, Area Headquarters Mannar visited the inaugural occasion of the programme as the chief invitee, in the company of 215 Brigade Commander Colonel H.L.V.M Liyanage and several other senior officers. Brigadier Dias registered the first patient and commenced the day's programme. Dental surgeons in the medical team paid special attention to students who visited the medical camp.

Senior citizens and civilians who were associated with the project were full of praise to the Singaporean hospitality and expressed their gratitude to the foreign medical team and the Army for organizing it.

A New Economic Paradigm

Concerned Malaysians need to take cognisance of the following facts:

• The global capitalist economy is ailing. The drive for profits by cutting production costs has reduced wages all over the world. As a result there is insufficient demand to fuel an economy predicated on the profit motive. The world economy is in for a long period of stagnation.

• We are reaching the limits of our environment. Oil is going to run out in the next 30 years. There is a high possibility that global warming is going to lead to ecological disaster and disruption of human society on a scale never seen before. We need to reduce our carbon footprint, and urgently. Wasteful consumption has to stop — but such consumption is profitable to the businesses!

• Modern, industrialised economies can be built without entrepreneurs. The USSR is an example of that. Yes, it was a dictatorship with a terrible human rights record. But the fact remains that a backward European country could develop into the second super-power within a span of 40 years without the help of capitalists i.e. capitalists are not essential for the development of an advanced industrial economy.

The question we need to ask ourselves is — can we devise a truly democratic political system to administer an economy where production is not for profits but is centred on human need

Towards a NEW paradigm

We need to explore these alternatives. All the great religious leaders could not have got it wrong when they advocated a more humane and caring society. We need to think out of the box. We need to look at the experiments taking place in Latin America where democratically-elected governments in Venezuela and Bolivia, which keep touching base with the voters through referendums periodically, are trying to re-distribute the wealth of the country. In the process they have unlocked the power of poor communities to help themselves and build a better, more caring society.

We need to work towards an alternative world order, starting with a community of nations that believes that:

• people come before profits;

• trade should be for the mutual benefit of the peoples of both nations and not to maximise the profits of the largest corporations;

• knowledge is the collective property of all mankind and should not be hoarded by corporations and used to generate profits.

We can’t leave the planning for the future to the prime minister and to the NEAC. They are clearly still stuck inside the old and tired neo-liberal box. Ordinary Malaysian need to start engaging in determining the future of our society. It is too important an issue to leave to politicians. The PM has said that the government will get feedback from society. Perhaps that is a good forum to start the process of dialogue about what sort of society we wish to build for future generations. — aliran.com

* Dr Jeyakumar Devaraj is an Aliran member and Sungai Siput MP.

From The Center for Progressive Christianity

Open Path
We promote an understanding of Christian practice and teaching that leads to a greater concern for the way people treat each other than for the way people express their beliefs, the acceptance of all people, and a respect for other religious traditions. We affirm the variety and depth of human experience and the richness of each person's search for meaning, and we encourage the use of sound scholarship, critical inquiry, and all intellectual powers to understand the experience and presence of God in human life. We are opposed to any exclusive dogma that limits the search for truth and free inquiry, and we encourage work that eases the pain, suffering and degradation inherent in many of the structures of society, as well as work that keeps central to the Christian life fair, open, peaceful, and loving treatment of all human beings.


The Open Sea

Ship at sea
By: Sara

Do you remember the first time you were ever exposed to progressive Christianity? Were you SO excited? Did you find yourself, like me, flooded with relief to discover that there really was a way to reconcile your experiences and knowledge with your spirituality and your faith? I am new to progressive Christianity, although as I look back I see that I have always been on this path. My journey has lead me through quite a few years of knowing what I rejected – legalism, hypocrisy, intolerance, dogmatism, … but it wasn’t until finding TCPC that I could in any fashion, articulate what it was that I affirmed. So, it is here where some of my struggles end,

First, let me lay out some context: My life before consisted of rules, which, if followed, were supposed to make me “right with God”. My life before consisted of having neat little categories for everything – my systematic theology was clearly defined and I had all the answers. But I was that clanging gong – I had no love. I said I followed Jesus, but I had become a lover of my own belief system, rather than a true lover of my neighbor. But then life came in and shook me around like a squeaky dog toy and my “rules” began to seem inconsistent with living a life of joy, of compassion, of love. My neat little boxes had become stifling. My life had become about what you Knew, rather than about how you Lived. So that was what I had to walk away from.


It was at this point that TCPC came into my life and some wonderful caring, individuals who assured me I was growing, despite my inability to coherently converse about what was happening. So I grew. But just the other day I found myself looking back at the “old me” with a kind of sentimentality and I wondered why. Here is this momentous change occurring in my mind and heart but I found myself foolishly yearning for that which I no longer have – absolutes. Now I know this sounds absurd, so let me explain.

John A. Shedd once wrote “A ship in the harbor is safe, but that is not what ships were built for.” I have left my old spiritual harbor, and I KNOW this is the right path for me. Of that I have no question. My ship feels sturdy and the wind is at my back. But, back there in the harbor, I felt safe -- even though I fully acknowledge that the safety I felt then came more from ignorance and legalism. What a basic, powerful human need it is to feel safe! To know. To have an answer. I think I’m still wrapping my head around finding security and peace in this mysterious process of growing in love, rather than pursuing the “right” answers. But it’s hard -- All I have ever known up until now have been absolutes, and even knowing now that the absolutes were incorrect for me, I still miss them. Silly, isn’t it!

So, today I stand on the deck of my ship. I have left the harbor behind and I think I will stop looking back. What mystery, or adventure, heartache or revelation might await me on the open sea? I know not. Only that I was made to find out.

From
The Center for Progressive Christianity provides guiding ideas, networking opportunities, and resources for progressive churches, organizations, individuals and others with connections to Christianity.

We promote an understanding of Christian practice and teaching that leads to a greater concern for the way people treat each other than for the way people express their beliefs, the acceptance of all people, and a respect for other religious traditions.

God in a Bottle

“When a scientist brings a bottle of sea water back to his laboratory, it is still essentially sea.” This analogy is sometimes used to explain how Jesus in human form was still actually God himself. Yet, it also illustrates how we can sometimes have too limited a view of God.

Suppose an exchange teacher took a bottle of seawater with him to a landlocked country, showed it to a class of children and told them that they had now seen the sea. Would this really give them a full appreciation of the nature of the sea?

Even those who have dived into the depths or sailed single-handed around Cape Horn only have a partial knowledge of the oceans. South Sea islanders may spend most of their lives by, in or on the sea but they have no appreciation of what the sea can be like for the crew on an Icelandic trawler in a winter storm. Even oceanographers would not claim to know everything that goes on in the great deeps. On Boxing Day 2004 the world was shocked at the power contained within one wave.

How much more beyond our understanding then is the creative force that produced the oceans on this minor planet which orbits one of trillions of stars? Yet we too often think that we can encapsulate God in definitions and doctrines. Some even have the effrontery to claim that they have the only truth about God and all other experiences of God are invalid. It is like telling people that unless they have ridden the waves on a surfboard, they have no real experience of the sea. No such attempt to present the “the simple truth” about God as a neat package of ideas is going to come even close to doing him justice. He is far more wonderful and multi-dimensional than we can ever imagine. When we insist that people see God as we do, we attempt to contain God within our own faith-shaped bottle.

Too often we project onto God our own understandings of unlimited power and complete knowledge. This is why God is so often depicted very much like a benevolent medieval king on his throne - who listens to the petitions of his subjects, is munificent to those who submit to him but executes terrible justice on those who disobey him. Just what we would do, in fact, if we were in his place. Some even claim to know how God thinks and attribute to God motives from their own speculation, such as “God must always act against sin” or “God can only forgive people if they believe the church’s teaching.” This measures their own level of compassion rather than the depth of God’s love and mercy. This kind of thinking puts God in a bottle shaped in our own image.

Some believe that God is perfectly revealed in scripture. They forget that God cannot be contained in words, particularly in the pre-scientific and often poetic descriptions of people’s experiences of God contained in most sacred books. That is why we find such different pictures in the bible as a God who orders genocide and joins in battles by hurling great hailstones and one who is the good shepherd going to great lengths to find the one lost sheep. Also, whenever we read or discuss scripture, we apply our personal interpretations to the words. Unfortunately, we too often use scripture more to condemn others’ lifestyles and to exclude their beliefs rather than to challenge ourselves. These books can inspire but they only become the word of God when they are lived out and so change people’s lives. God does not fit into a book-shaped bottle.

We can also oversimplify perceptions of God, if we make unqualified statements such as “Jesus is God”, and sing hymns like “Jesus, you are the only one”, or “Jesus is my God.” This can lead people to think that we share the Oneness Pentecostalists’ belief that our God = Jesus. If we lose sight of the manifold ways we can experience God, symbolised in the Trinity, and of Jesus’ humanity, our perception of God can then resemble the figure of Christ on Mormon temples. Of course, it is easier for most people to relate to the human figure of Jesus than to a vast, intangible God. That is why some popular televangelists, with millions of viewers, talk about the Father and the Son in human terms, almost as if Jesus were a kind of superhero. However, this is God in a human-shaped bottle.

Faith is about relationships, love and commitment. Therefore we should encourage people to develop their own personal growing faith through their individual experience of God rather than try to impose our own faith upon them by telling them what they must believe. How many people have we lost because we insisted that their faith must be a particular shape and their experience of God did not fit into that bottle? Jesus compared the attempt to contain the power and vibrancy of a living and dynamic faith within inflexible religious traditions with the folly of putting new wine into old bottles. Indeed, attempts by church leaders to constrain new experiences of God and new Christian movements within the bottle of orthodoxy have led to many denominational splits in the past and to young people leaking out of the church in huge numbers in recent decades.

Albert Schweitzer only fulfilled his potential in God’s service when he stopped trying to shape and contain God with definitions and dogma and allowed God to shape him. His doubts over orthodox doctrine about Jesus caused him to give up preaching and to respond to the call to live out his faith in Jesus by setting up a hospital and leper colony in Africa. He concluded The Quest of the Historical Jesus: with these words:

“He comes to us as One unknown without a name, as of old by the lake-side He came to those men who knew Him not. He speaks to us the same word: 'Follow thou me!' and sets us to the tasks which He has to fulfil for our time. He commands. And to those who obey Him, whether they be wise or simple, He will reveal Himself in the toils, the conflicts, the sufferings which they shall pass through in His fellowship, and, as an ineffable mystery, they shall learn in their own experience Who He Is.”

Philip Sudworth

From THE CHRISTIAN POST SINGAPORE

Christianity Promotes Interfaith Relationships: NCCS President
Friday, May. 14, 2010 Posted: 1:51:34PM HKT


Bishop Dr Robert M Solomon, President of the National Council of Churches of Singapore, speaking at an event. (Photo: The Christian Post)

There is a popular misconception that the stronger the religious convictions, the deeper the divide between adherents of different religions. Many modern thinkers maintain that religion needs to be jettisoned for the sake of world peace and human progress.

Truth is, the Bible teaches Christians to build social ties with adherents of other religions.

This social acceptance comes from the core Christian belief in the existence of a transcendent yet personal God who created and saves humankind.

Knowing God as both Creator and Saviour shapes the way Christians relate with those of other faiths, according to the President of the National Council of Churches of Singapore (NCCS).

“As human beings created by the same God, there are many commonalities between Christians and their non-Christian neighbours as we encounter the same physical and social environment and often face the same issues because we live in the same world,” said Bishop Dr Robert M Solomon.

Speaking to The Christian Post during a special interview, Bishop Solomon stressed the need for Christians to relate with non-Christians at an interpersonal level. This will prevent stereotyping, he said.

At the same time, the Bible essentially teaches Jesus Christ as the only way to salvation. Here, unfortunately, Christians may adopt a belittling attitude toward other religions.

This is based on a simplistic understanding of the theological superiority of Christianity, an important Singapore theologian has recently argued.

To gain a proper understanding of other religions, it is necessary to grasp the human need for God as universal and existential.

“We are made for God, and we will experience a profound sense of restlessness until we are in communion with our Creator,” said Dr Roland Chia.

Non-Christian religions, he argued, can be viewed as “expressions of the human search for meaning.” Though theologically imperfect, they “contain many important spiritual, moral and human truths and values that correspond to the revelation of God in Scripture,” he expressed.

And so non-Christian religions can be seen as ‘preparations for the Gospel’, he highlighted. For this reason, Christians must treat non-Christians with due respect.

Christians should treat others with gentleness and respect even as they find opportunities to share their faith with the latter, according to Bishop Solomon.

“Evangelism is not making a sale,” said the NCCS President. “It is an expression of our love for others, and this love will always treat others with respect.”

Even if others are unwilling to hear them out, Christians “can still go on doing good to them and praying for their wellbeing,” he urged.

The Bible teaches a theological, not social, exclusiveness, the bishop highlighted.

Christians should not seek exclusiveness in their social relationships. That is, except where they involve idolatry or sinful practices.

He said: “We visit the same markets, fly on the same planes, and take part in the same sports. In these things we should not seek exclusiveness.”
On how Christians can promote inter-religious harmony, the bishop advised them not to cut themselves off from social interaction with people of other faiths. Then he encouraged Christians to have “as many deep personal friendships as possible with persons of other faiths in their workplaces and neighbourhoods.” Finally Christians should not do anything that is unnecessarily offensive to others.

Moreover Christians need not hesitate to participate in interfaith dialogue and cooperative humanitarian efforts.

Asked why many Christian leaders fear involvement in such areas, Bishop Solomon replied: “Why should they fear if they are confident of their faith.”

The worry may be rooted in a wrong idea of inter-religious dialogue to begin with.

Such dialogue, however, does not seek to amalgamate different religious groups.

Instead interfaith dialogue is an opportunity to develop friendships and explore common social concerns. These include the poor and environmental issues, the bishop said.

There is no contradiction between the Christian call and nation-building. Christians are to make positive contributions to the nation as witnesses of the good God they serve.

Bishop Solomon also highlighted social issues he felt Christians should address.

Firstly there is the welfare of foreign workers in Singapore. Secondly there are the effects of a fast-paced, consumerist lifestyle in relationships especially those in the family. Thirdly Christians could help the poor in society and bridging income disparities.

Christians can also contribute to the growing needs of the aging population. They can share their views on public square issues that affect their lives. And they can pray for their nation and society.