by PATRICK LEJTENYI

In case you haven’t heard, next Monday marks the fifth anniversary of the 9/11 attacks. It also marks the opening of the World Religions After September 11 global congress at McGill, with almost two dozen academics, theologians, journalists and ethicists arriving to talk about religion, and whether God’s love can be used to justify more than just killing people.

Power versus piety

Presiding over the proceedings is McGill’s Arvind Sharma, the Birks Professor of Comparative Religion in the Religious Studies department. He says the world is “at the cusp of a historical transformation.”

“Fundamentalism is a response of religious traditionalism to the perceived decline in power in the public square, as opposed to orthodoxy, which is a reaction to the perception of a decline of piety,” he says. “It could be argued that the rise of secularism through globalization may be the catalyst for more fundamentalism. The more offended [people of faith] feel, the more they need to mobilize.”

The grim fact of life, however, is that religion may just be one more excuse for the killing of innocents.

But given all the great things religious fundamentalism has brought us—suicide bombers, intelligent design, the rolling back of women’s rights, birth control access and stem cell research, to name but a few—isn’t it possible that the world may just be getting a little bit sick and tired of it all? Isn’t secularism looking a bit more appealing, at least to some? Well, says Sharma, yes.

“The rise of Hindu nationalism in India was met by more strident secularism, as the secularists became more vocal,” he says. Still, he doesn’t think that mean people will be putting their crosses, menorahs, shrines and turbans away any time soon.

But, “If I read the situation right,” he says, “I think people will move away from religion and toward spirituality, especially in the Western world, where church attendance is down—except in the United States—but new movements are growing.”

Declaring peace

What Sharma really wants to come out of the congress, he says, is another step towards the idea he’s been working towards for the last 10 years: a universal declaration of human rights by the world’s religions, a document inspired by the 1948 universal declaration of human rights drawn up at the UN’s founding.

“If all the religions of the world come together to prepare this declaration, in this sense the gap between the secular and the religious can be breached,” he says. The draft has been sponsored by four Nobel Laureates for Peace: the Dalai Lama, Archbishop Desmond Tutu of South Africa, Bishop Belo of East Timor and Shirin Ebadi, an Iranian lawyer who will be attending the conference.

Among the long list of conference attendees are famed mind-body medicine guru Deepak Chopra, former nun and British academic Karen Armstrong, Iranian journalist and dissident Akbar Ganji, Sri Swami Dayananda Saraswati, a Vedic teacher from India, and Margo Somerville, a McGill ethicist.

They’ll be covering a lot of ground over at Palais des Congrès, where the conference will be held. Aside from carving out the declaration, they’ll be looking at religion and the media, spirituality, science, healing, women and proselytization and religious freedoms. There will be additional themes around children and youth, conflict and peace, diplomacy, war, ethics and contemporary religious leaders.

Theme of reconciliation

The underlying theme, at least for Sharma, is one of reconciliation, of showing that the secular world and the religious need not exist as polar opposites of each other. They may, in fact, even be complimentary, to a degree.

“One way of looking at World War II is to see the outcome of the forces of secular extremism getting out of hand,” he says. “We saw the rise of secular extremism, then war, then the declaration of human rights, which was meant to be an antidote to secular extremism. If we believe religious fundamentalism is on the rise, since September 11 it has become even more active, so I think [a declaration by the world’s religions] can have force, in time. The UN declaration was an antidote after the disease. This can be a prophylactic, to prevent extremism from occurring.”

For more information on the congress, see www.worldsreligionsafter911.com.