Whatever we once were, we are no longer just a Christian nation; we are also a Jewish nation, a Muslim nation, a Buddhist nation, a Hindu nation, and a nation of nonbelievers.
The Christians and Jews can live side by side with the Muslims, as they did in the heart of Europe for over 800 years in Andalusia.
All... religions show the same disparity between belief and practice, and each is safe till it tries to exclude the rest.
It's wrong to say in India that a certain community is targeted while Hindus are allowed to flourish. This is wrong. Every community is allowed to flourish.
My mother was a Muslim and dad a Hindu. I got the best upbringing that anyone could. Never did I see any angst in my family owing to that: each practiced their own religion. My existence is the harmony that these two communities can achieve if they try.
We Christians bring peace and grace as a treasure to be offered to the world, but these gifts can bear fruit only when Christians live and work together in harmony. This makes it easier to contribute to building relations of respect and peaceful coexistence with those who belong to other religious traditions, and with non-believers.
From the 9th to the 15th centuries, the area which is now modern Spain was home to the greatest peaceful agglomeration of cultures ever known in the post-literate worldEven more remarkable than the flowering of art itself was the confluence of cultures that produced it: under the rule of Islam, Muslims, Jews and Christians lived and worked together in relative harmony.
For Hindus to expect Islam, Christianity or Zoroastrianism to be driven out of India is as idle a dream as it would be for Mussalmans to have only Islam of their imagination rule the world.
There is no fundamental cleavage between Hindus and Mussalmans. We have lived in the same land as brothers for generations and what has been possible all these years will certainly be possible in the future.
It is impossible for me to reconcile myself to the idea of conversion after the style that goes on in India and elsewhere today. It is an error which is perhaps the greatest impediment to the world's progress toward peace. ... Why should a Christian want to convert a Hindu to Christianity? Why should he not be satisfied if the Hindu is a good or godly man?
Jerusalem is old, Jerusalem is new, Jerusalem can hold Moslem, Christian, Jew.
