“I ADMIRE AND RESPECT YOUR RELIGION BUT I MAY NOT PURSUE IT” Isaiah Berlin and Interfaith Dialogue
Keywords:
Monism and Its Tenets, Pluralism and the Actual Human Experience of Diversity, Berlin: A Pluralist Not a Relativist, Pluralism as a Fact and Principle of Life, Threat of Conflict, Avoiding the Slippery Slopes of Relativism, Need for Imaginative Sympathy, Drawing from One’s Religious TraditionAbstract
The twenty-first century world is increasingly becoming “multiethnic, multicultural and multireligious.” In this unique and complex condition the question of negotiating and dealing with various ethnicities, cultures and religions becomes more acute and pressing. Hence, one is bound to look for fruitful and productive ways of navigating through the meandering maze of this difficult yet challenging context. In this modest article we look at Isaiah Berlin’s idea of value pluralism and how this would help us respond creatively to the vexing question particularly of religious pluralism. We discover that in his view, the strict and uncritical adherence to and imposition of “dogmatically believed-in-schemes” of values and ideals usually result in destructive consequences to societies, cultures and peoples.Thus, instead of proposing the harmony of many diverse voices into one voice, he recognizes the cacophony of voices. Instead of supporting uniformity, conformity and unanimity in values, his is a celebration of diversity, difference and abundance.
References
Berlin, “The Apotheosis of the Romantic Will,” 209.
Avery Plaw, “Why Monist Critiques Feed Value Pluralism,” Social Theory and Practice, 30, 1 (January 2004), 115.
Berlin, “The Pursuit of the Ideal” in The Crooked Timber of Humanity: Chapters in the History of Ideas, ed. Henry Hardy, London: John Murry Limited, 1990, 1.
Dupuis, Christianity and the Religions, 74-79.
Isaiah Berlin, “Alleged Relativism in Eighteenth-Century European Thought” in The Crooked Timber of Humanity, 79.
Isaiah Berlin, “My Intellectual Path” in The Power of Ideas, ed. Henry Hardy, Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 2000, 4.
Isaiah Berlin, “The Decline of Utopian Ideas in the West” in The Crooked Timber of Humanity, 27.
Michael Jinkins, Christianity, Tolerance and Pluralism: A Theological Engagement with Isaiah Berlin’s Social Theory, London and New York: Routledge, 2004, 76.
Paul Knitter, Introducing Theologies of Religions, Maryknoll: Orbis, 2002, 1.
Raimon Panikkar, “Religious Identity and Pluralism,” http://alt.rpivirtuell.net/workspace/users/535/Religionen%20Im%20Gespr%C3%A4ch%20-%20Texte%20aus%20RIG/RIG7-Panikkar-Identity.pdf, accessed on 8 September 2012.
