formal practices ranging from funerals to the building of small family shrines to honor
the dead. All of these activities were intended to stress ancestor worship for two rea-
sons. First, such worship underscored the importance of family to his followers. Sec-
ond, for Confucius, this type of worship was“the proper channeling of natural feelings
of grief, longing and guilt.”^266Developing Religious Tolerance
It seems that Homer was right when he noted that“all men have need of the Gods.”
The problem, as we pointed out in the introduction to this chapter, is that many peo-
ple now believe their god is the only god. Changes in technology and globalization in
the twenty-first century have introduced billions of people to a variety of multicul-
tural gods. Some they have understood, and others appear to be threatening and con-
fusing. Disagreements over which god is“the right god”have created a number of
problems. It is common knowledge that we are now experiencing a major collision
of religious and spiritual beliefs. We have seen discord and conflict between funda-
mentalism and modernism, the sacred and the secular, and religious pluralism and
religious exclusivism and monism. Those who become swayed by these dichotomies
do so for a host of reasons. As Prothero notes, some people seek vehemently to
advance a theological point, while“others stress religious differences in order to
make the political point that religious civilizations are fated to clash.”^267 Regardless
of their motives, trying to advance rigid, extreme, and dichotomized positions in the
name of a single ideology has made this a very dangerous world. As pointed out at the
onset of this chapter, perhaps at no other period in world history has it been more
imperative to understand various religions. In this chapter, you saw how people turn
to their gods to help them deal with the cosmic questions of how to behave during
this lifetime and how to cope with death. When comparing what a religion has told
followers about how they should behave with what we actually observe, it is crucial to
make the distinction between the theological traditions and how people act out that
theology. Bowker points out,“Religions offer ways of resisting what is wrong and dis-
pelling ignorance, but they cannot compel people to live in those ways.”^268 We agree
with Bowker.“To live those ways”is a matter of individual choice. It means taking
the best of what one’s worldview has to offer and rejecting those who misread the
messages of those religions. It also asks us to develop religious tolerance.
We should point out that religious tolerance takes many forms, but primarily it
requires that we allow others to embrace religious beliefs that may differ from our
own. Laws will not change deep-seated prejudice and hatred. As Albert Einstein,
who suffered intolerance for his Jewish heritage, once remarked,“Laws alone cannot
secure freedom of expression; in order that every man present his views without pen-
alty there must be a spirit of tolerance in the entire population.”
We believe that tolerance takes two different forms: one general and one specific.
The general is what the Dalai Lama calls“universal responsibility.”This broad and
universal appeal asks that each person seek harmony among all the world’s religions.
This is a kind of moral commitment to tolerate each other’s religious beliefs. Adding
to these general appeals, we suggest that there are some specific behaviors that you
can engage in to help you become more tolerant. Let us examine a few of these.
First, we begin with the advice that has been at the core of this entire chapter.
Learn all you can about religious groups different from your own.Schmidt and his coau-
thors develop this point in greater detail when they write,“As you plunge into theConfucianism and Notions About Death 157Copyright 2017 Cengage Learning. All Rights Reserved. May not be copied, scanned, or duplicated, in whole or in part. Due to electronic rights, some third party content may be suppressed from the eBook and/or eChapter(s).