THE SIKH SPIRIT AND THE GLOBAL SOCIETY Keynote Speech

We all know that this wide big world has today got transformed into a small global village as a result of the InfoTech revolution and development of fast means of transportation during the past hundred years or so. As a result, people of different races, religions and regions are now our next-door neighbors. Different faith-communities inter-penetrate and inter-act with one another. Gone are the days when people belonging to different racial, religious and cultural denominations lived in their own tiny, isolated camps, blissfully ignorant of whoever existed or whatever happened outside. As it is, we find this global world facing conflicts and violence raised in the name of religion by what we might call ‘superpower imperium’ and ‘majoritarian imperium’. The former has manifested in the form of intercivilization conflicts and the latter in targeting the religious minority in the name of homogeneity. The twentieth century, especially its latter half has seen the resurgence of religion as well as upsurge in religious fundamentalism, though both are related only to the extent of being contemporaneous. The modern western civilization with its 300-year-old history of commitment to secularism treats religious resurgence only as an umbrella term for religious intolerance, religious conflict and violence, and favors the rolling back of religious resurgence and reassertion of secularism. However, the solution to religious conflicts and violence lies not in the western-style secularism based on dichotomous worldview but in religious pluralism [Note # 1] becoming an essential component of the value system of our modern life. Religious resurgence is not to be confused with religious violence as the cure for religious violence may ultimately lie in a renewed appreciation for religion itself.