Religious Pluralism and the Nonbeliever

I like how Eboo Patel, executive director of something called Interfaith Youth Core, parsed his terms in last Thursday's Senate Foreign Relations Committee hearing on engaging Muslim communities -- specifically how those terms didn't exclude nonbelievers or promote unity at their expense.

PATEL: Mr. Chairman, I believe that the question of the 21st century will be the question of the faith line -- that is, how diverse religious communities choose to interact, whether that interaction moves toward conflict or toward cooperation.

The biggest mistake we can make on the question of the faith line is to define it wrong. The wrong definition of the faith line pits Muslims against Christians, or believers against nonbelievers.

If we define the faith line as Muslims against Christians, we are left with a world of 2 billion people at war with a world of 1.3 billion people. That is an eternal war.

I prefer to divide the faith line -- to define the faith line as a line that divides people I call religious pluralists from religious totalitarians.

I have a very simple definition for a religious pluralist. It's somebody who believes in a society where people from diverse backgrounds live in equal dignity and mutual loyalty.

I have a very simple definition of a religious totalitarian. It's somebody who wants their community to dominate and everyone else to suffocate.