DESPITE obvious differences, student religious organizations around Grounds have many traits in common. They all strive to better their community, to educate others and recruit as many people as possible to their respective faiths. More importantly, they all fail to talk to each other as much as they should. In this community of incredible diversity, with such an opportunity for interfaith dialogue, there is a lack of widespread, consistent communication between student religious groups. We must increase interfaith discussion at the University.
The Interfaith Council was established after Sept. 11 and is a starting point in establishing dialogue among different student religious groups. Interfaith Council meetings are held twice a month and usually draw 15 to 20 representatives of different student religious groups. In these meetings, events are planned in which members of assorted faiths can jointly participate. However, these events are not structured in a way that ensures detailed discussion among different religious groups. Rather, members of different faiths tend to ignore the specific areas in which their ideologies contradict each other. Although this is conducive to establishing interfaith unity, it is detrimental to the pursuit of truth.
The number of students involved in interfaith efforts is disproportionately low compared to the number of those who meet regularly within their own faiths to discuss their own religions. The majority of students in religious organizations do not attend interfaith functions.
The stakes simply are too high for most of the members of student religious groups not to seriously debate the concrete theological issues on which they disagree. The students in religious organizations are with few exceptions entirely sure that their respective religious perceptions are correct. However, because their faiths contradict each other in major and specific ways, most or all of them must be partially or totally mistaken.
For example, either the Christian groups are correct that Jesus Christ was the son of God and the only way to salvation, or the groups of Muslims, Jews and others are correct that he was not. When religious groups ignore such questions in their interfaith communications, they timidly hide from the truth behind the guise of respect and tolerance.
Those who believe in eternal afterlife, as most of the student religious groups do, need only to examine their own beliefs to realize why they are obliged to discuss specifics with other religions. The Intervarsity Christian Fellowship, for example, states "salvation is found through Jesus Christ alone" (http://scs.student.virginia.edu/~ivcf/).
This theme of exclusive salvation is common among groups of different religions, and it makes it morally impossible for them to justify not challenging each others' faiths. We don't want to spend our lives in constant conflict. But if we are to live an eternity after death, the 60 or 70 years we spend on Earth are almost entirely insignificant to us. Some brief disagreement now may be justified if we seriously believe it can avert even a small amount of eternal torture.
It is the inherent right of every student religious group to think that salvation is only possible through the message that it professes. But groups must stand by this belief and be held morally accountable to it. How could a believer in an eternal afterlife ever be complacent believing that so many of his peers are headed for damnation, where one hundred trillion years of unimaginable torture would not bring them even one step closer to relief? If religious students have any compassion for their peers, they cannot justify resting until every possible person - members of other religious groups included - has heard the one true message of salvation. To do so would be to allow an enormous amount of people to go to horribly torturous fates.
It is worth the risk of offending a few people in the short term to prevent this eternal damnation. Even if a person rejects the idea of an afterlife, the questions religion addresses warrant a frank debate among those claiming to know the truth.
If student religious groups are interested in pursuing truth, they must realize that the majority of them are certainly wrong about many of the things in which they strongly believe. No matter how passionate, how faithful or how sure a person is that his religion is correct, he must remember that there are millions just as passionate, faithful and sure that he is wrong.
The Interfaith Council and student religious groups can help the student body by organizing large scale forums and debates in which different faiths discuss their beliefs. If students do not challenge their perceptions of difficult theological questions now, while they are in a community of diversity, they may forego their only chance to avoid a life dominated by false superstition. We cannot shy away from such frightening issues if we want to have any confidence in our beliefs.
Don't refrain from tossing your faith around for fear that it might shatter. If it does, you're probably better off without it anyway.
(Anthony Dick's column normally appears Fridays in The Cavalier Daily. He can be reached at adick@cavalierdaily.com.)
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