Mar 4, 2015 By David Singer 4 min read

In an ideal society, everyone would understand and appreciate all religions as various expressions of eternally escaping truths beyond human comprehension. Religions came about as a way to explain our morals, our existence and why the two former things matter so much to us. They’re all in the business of understanding our quest for peaceful co-existence in spite of our human nature to destroy each other because we know each other too well. And yet, we don’t know each other and our religions at all.

On Feb. 28, local religious leaders gathered at the Ahmadiyaa Muslim Mosque in Wilkinsburg to educate the public on their respective faiths’ origins in hopes of educating the public on their shared belief that God is peaceful and good.

Sanjay Mehta, of the Hindu Jain Temple in Monroeville, stated that there is no singular founder of the Hindu-Jain faiths, so a big moral emphasis is a lack of arrogance.

“The entire universe is an expansion of God. And we are manifestations of God,” he said, “and we are all potentially divine. It is a matter of understanding and unveiling the divine; moving toward it through prayer, through (meditative) yoga, and through self-examination.”

Self-examination is not what ISIS and other political hijackers of Islam are doing, according to Fahmeed Rahman, one of the Muslim organizers of the Religious Founder’s Day event.

“Jihad doesn’t ‘practically’ exist anymore, at least not how the general public understands it,” he said of the faith’s tenet meaning personal struggle. “What terrorists do with Jihad, they never get past personal reflection and change, which is the first and most important part of Jihad: to struggle with the understanding of yourself and your faith.”

He said ISIS and other Islamic extremists use the word Jihad in a lazy, uneducated or otherwise generic way, so that the word itself becomes a terroristic propaganda tool; a way to justify their interpretation of faith as motivation for violent zealotry. Their actions are historically ignorant expressions of faith. As a Jew or Christian would no longer stone an adulterer or kill those wearing mixed types of clothing, no longer should religious literalists use violent passages in the Quran, Bible or Torah as legitimate instruction on how to carry oneself in the faith.

I happen to be a secular atheist who was raised in various modes of Christianity. My brother, Dan, a biological research assistant at Pitt, and I philosophized a bit on the talks.

“I think we should also value intellectual honesty,” Dan said, “to be honest with each other insofar as what we know, what we believe to be true, but also why we want to believe those things. So we should also value empiricism, and experiments, because they show us when we are wrong even when we strongly hold a belief that we hold as true or right. Those emotions attached to those beliefs are so strong, they can’t be broken… especially with Westernized Abrahamic religions, they’re not concerned with conciousness and take God’s described nature for granted. We need to concern ourselves with the nature of ourselves first to understand spirituality.”

“I love Neil deGrasse Tyson as an educator, but his focus is on the cosmos. He believes it’s our most important endeavor for our survival, and also understanding ourselves,” he said.

“But I think it’s obvious, that (much like religion) we need to first understand the mind, so that we can understand our relationship to each other, and our relationship to the cosmos. Religion started asking these questions and now it’s up to science to figure it out.”

Such is the nature of faith. Each religion asserts itself to be the one, true and original faith, each claiming to have human nature pegged. All the world’s religions have great things to offer, but literalists and extremists are holding us back.

So much like the Jewish, Christian, Muslim, Sikh, and Hindu and Jain leaders express, we can’t simply promise to ourselves to play along to get along. We must make a more concerted effort to understand each others’ beliefs, and be willing to check our own at the door. It’s the only way we’re going to get out alive, and maybe past this one.