We Still haven’t Given Peace a Chance by Father Tom Bonacci www.thomaspbonacci. net

We members of our local Interfaith Peace Project have committed our resources and energy to the cause of creating attitudes and environments that will foster the development of peace among adherents of various religious traditions...

My own involvement with the Interfaith Peace Project began three days before 9/11 at Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania’s Carlow University. We subsequently used the fallen towers as a grim case study to explore how things can go so wrong with religion. Two hundred people showed up at the first tentative meeting.
We are confronting the disturbing reality of people using their particular faith position as justification for criticizing, condemning, and even violently opposing people with whom they disagree. Steven Weinberg, a Nobel Prize-winning American physicist, made the uncomfortable observation that…

With or without religion, you would have good people doing good things and evil people doing evil things. But for good people to do evil things, that takes religion.

We have come to realize that the people who identify too tightly with their particular faith traditions become the source of religious warfare. Such people take it personally when anyone attacks or even fails to embrace the teachings of Buddha, Jesus, Mohammed, Joseph Smith, or whichever prophet they’ve committed themselves to. Any sign of disrespect for their particular prophet leads to feelings ranging from disdain to murderous rage.
On the other hand, the majority of members in each of the faith communities may be devout, but they are living in the real world and value peace above any dogma. They are willing to approach religious issues with an attitude of cooperation rather than confrontation towards those who disagree with their religious convictions. At the extremes, it’s the difference between someone like Osama bin Laden and Mahatma Gandhi.

Understanding that Leads to Peace
We are convinced that there can be no world peace without religious peace, and that religious peace will only be possible when religious people learn to appreciate views from other traditions than their own. The walls of distrust and hatred, that members of various religious traditions erect against each other, are always founded upon ignorance. If we only will take the time to learn about each other’s faith — read the scriptures and examine the religious symbols belonging to traditions outside our own — then our emerging understanding will inevitably bring the walls of that ignorance tumbling down. 
Therefore, the mission of the Interfaith Peace Project is to provide cross-religious experiences, learning opportunities, and interpersonal encounters that will bring about the kind of appreciation that otherwise would remain restricted mostly to people with the time and energy to attend formal classes in the comparative religion department of some institution of higher learning.