When religious conflicts cause violence, how can religious practice bring peace?

Answer Podcast

Transcript

This is an AI-generated transcript and may contain some errors.
Actually when we talk about different religious traditions, we can see these basically like different universities ultimately the universities are meant to give education, to raise a person to a higher level of understanding to a higher level of preparedness for dealing with life so like that different religions are essentially different ways for helping our spiritual evolution, so what is important is that we grow spiritual so the religion so different religions offer us different pathways, no we keep the purpose in mind in the Bhagwan Gita, the book which I talked about it concludes with a very dramatic declaration it says give up all religions sarva dharman parityaj you say how can a religious book say give up all religions but the purpose is give up all religions sarva dharman parityaj mam ekam sarvam and become devoted to the absolute, so religion is meant for God God is not meant for religion that means sometimes people got so caught in their own religious practices that their religion becomes, makes them very close minded not only close minded, sometimes it can make them fanatical also fanatical means the idea that if my religion is the only way, that’s like saying my university is the only valid university, all the universities are false, that’s not true there can be different universities, so the extreme version of this which we are seeing unfortunately in the world today is where you say if you are not following my religion you are going to go to hell, and some fanatics say we will get you to hell faster also so this happens because what has happened, religion has not remained as a way to God God has become God has become a tool for religion, so religion is meant for God, God is not meant for religion, so when the purpose is clear, then what path we follow is not all that important we can follow our path faithfully without having to become intolerant about other paths but when we are not clear about the ultimate goal, then the path itself seems to be a cliff, say somebody is climbing up a mountain, there can be different ways of going up the mountain now if I have gone high up the mountain, I can say okay that person has also gone high up that path, that person has gone high up that path, but if somebody doesn’t understand the purpose ultimately to climb up and get to the top somebody thinks that taking the path alone is important the path is not important, the purpose is important, so whichever tradition we feel inspired to practice we can connect ourselves to our spiritual side we will have more stability and clarity in coping with life’s ups and downs any other comments or questions yes please