Religious extremism on minority rights needs to be addressed: International Buddhist Foundation

"I would like to say that we are happy to be resourceful individuals in our capacity to eliminate this crisis in the future. This matter which is right in front of us today is not a mere topic of discussion, but something that is really out there in the world that needs to be addressed, so it has come far enough to be spoken in a conference like this," Sumanajot said at a conference on the impact of religious extremism on minorities rights' in Geneva.

International Buddhist Foundation of Geneva representative Welagedara Sumanajot has said that religious extremism on minority rights is not a mere topic of discussion but something that needs to be addressed. "I would like to say that we are happy to be resourceful individuals in our capacity to eliminate this crisis in the future. This matter which is right in front of us today is not a mere topic of discussion, but something that is really out there in the world that needs to be addressed, so it has come far enough to be spoken in a conference like this," Sumanajot said at a conference on 'the impact of religious extremism on minorities rights' in Geneva.

"When we take a close look at this problem, we see that this is a matter of power, for example, people from the same religious tradition can be a minority at one place and also majority at another place. It really depends on their status at that particular place. Therefore, there is no group or tradition that can be exempted from this accusation - a group that belongs to a Buddhist religious tradition can be ill-treated somewhere because of being the minority, but the same religious tradition can be the dominant one in a country where Buddhism stands as the main religion," said Sumanajot. A human can be endowed with 6 basic mental characteristics, namely, greed, hatred, and delusion as the negative aspects, and non-greed, non-hatred, and non-delusion as positive aspects, he said.

Based on that, all the negative and positive aspects emerge within the socio-cultural body. When all those characteristics arise in thoughts, speech, and action, many discrepancies are brought into life. So, inflicting suffering on others, discrimination, racism, and all those unethical behaviors come into being based on those mental dispositions. Presently, we are in an unfortunate position where we witness this tragedy happening all around the world as well as in the society we live in, the International Buddhist Foundation representative said. "Religious extremism is just one cause among the many causes such as race, tribe, clan, caste, ability, capability, power, gender and sexuality that make something outnumbered," he said.

"Yet, the crisis made by religious extremism itself has become something for which the solutions have to be hardly found, but we believe that the solutions can be obtained by anyone who has a pure ambition to do it with an equanimous approach." "Religion, clan, caste, and so on are just conceptual impressions. We believe that materialistic and idealistic approaches have a great impact on them too," Sumanajot said at the conference. (ANI)

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