AUGUST is the year’s most colourful month as streets and buildings take on a parade look with joyously fluttering Jalur Gemilang. Three colours – red, white, and blue – represent the cultural, ethnic, and religious diversity exemplified by the Commonwealth. But leaving aside its touristic value, is diversity more a pain than a gain?
Is it better to do a Trump and repaint the United States one colour? Some Malaysians yearn to produce a Malaysian version of Trump. To counter their influence, let’s always cherish our multi-ethnicity, multi-culturalism, and multi-religiosity as key essentials of the Merdeka spirit.
Diversity isn’t a packet of sweets that gets you some extra votes at the polls. And once that is done, it’s time again to sing “Get back, Jojo, get back to where you once belonged.” Where do we belong?
All the world’s 7.7 billion people are descended from lineages that go back to a lake district in East Africa. From that location human migrant bands spread out and crisscrossed the globe, spawning a tremendous diversity of cultural, ethnic, and religious hues to suit particular conditions.
Multi-ethnicity with its accompanying multi-cultural and multi-religious flavour is a work of nature that is still in progress. Life exists because of diversity. There will be no water to give you life if the partnership of H2O were to break up, with the two hydrogen fellows telling the oxygen chap to go back to where he belongs. That’s chemistry.
Even if you’re the kingpin, you can do far more when you bond with others who are different. Take carbon as an illustration of partnership: by itself carbon is awesome with the pink diamond look and Ferrari fuel power. But it is only when the carbon element bonds with hydrogen, oxygen, nitrogen, phosphorus, sulfur and selenium that there can be life on earth. Your body is alive because of diversity.
Malaysia’s advantage over 120 other nations is that it has – in addition to the majority Muslims – sizable populations of Buddhists, Christians, Hindus, Sikhs, and Taoists. Sadly we have wasted this great advantage. Is there a partnership of these six religions to help Malaysia overcome its challenges? Or do we see other religions as the challenge and go our separate ways?
The focus is on projecting one’s religion as supreme and superior to all else. From the idea of God’s oneness, we have wrongly deduced that there can only be one true religion, one true saviour, and one true community of believers. This is supremacist thinking and a misinterpretation of scripture that pushes believers into rivalry instead of cooperation. Has it occurred to you that we can’t build true nationhood if religions face off in competition mode?
There are clear limits to the central role of any religion, if you read scripture correctly. Our solar system revolves around the sun, making it the centre. The sun revolves around a black hole at the centre of the galaxy. Your religion may be the centre of a globally-spread dynamic civilisation. Pause here. There is no centre of the universe. The universe is like the surface of a hugely inflated balloon. Where is the centre of a balloon surface? Every point is the centre.
Go deep and you find a nucleus as centre of the atom. Plunge into the nucleus and you find a quantum field. Where is the centre of this quantum field? None. Every point is the centre. Every religion is a global centre of truth and solidarity. The chant “God is one” shortens by half the complete scriptural teaching: God is one undivided whole. This idea that only one religion contains the truth and the key to salvation is a denial of God’s wholeness.
In mathematics the two elemental digits are “1” and “0”. One is 1, and the Whole is 0. If you understand God merely as one, you are missing the whole picture. The 0 is a circle that encompasses all truth and reality. If you understand God as one undivided whole, you will drop the idea of supremacy. Religions take diverse paths, but all of them are within the circle.
The writer champions interfaith harmony. Comments: letters@thesundaily.com
