The Parliament of World’s Religions is one of the frontrunners for advocating peace and cooperation between religious sects around the world. The famous speech by Swami Vivekananda which started with “Brothers and Sisters of America” was delivered at this conference in 1893. This platform has been used to address the issues faced by indigenous groups around the world and also promote brotherhood and a better understanding of each other.
After the 1893 conference, it took almost a century to host the next one in 1993. This was followed by events in 1999, 2004, 2009, 2015 and 2018. The 8th Parliament is to be convened in 2021 in a virtual format due to the pandemic.
Various international personalities have graced and spoken at this conference like the Dalai Lama, Nelson Mandela, Archbishop Desmond Tutu, Former US President Jimmy Carter, Nobel Peace Prize Winner Dr Shirin Ebadi, Queen Noor of Jordan, Dr Jane Goodall, Rabbi David Saperstein, Margaret Atwood, Bishop William Barber, Dr Hans Kung, and Amma the Hugging Saint.
Although an unofficial organisation holding little to no influence over the activities of any formal religious organisation, this conference has been essential in bringing to light the fact that there can always be a civilised dialogue between ideologically diverse groups.
Major religious groups including the Catholic Church have refused to accept the legitimacy of the organisation and consider it to be a purely decorative organisation with no legislative or decision making jurisdiction over any religion. Similar views have been expressed by the Church of England and the Organisation of Islamic Cooperation (OIC). This leads the gathering to be highly ineffective in changing the discourse or effecting any lasting change within their communities.
The presence of notable public figures at the conference, however, lend some credibility to the conference and has the power of creating change at an individual level around the world. This could snowball into a mass movement where humans would look beyond religion and work towards helping each other and not look for ways to harm based on religion.
Our source within the organisation has claimed that an unofficial meeting has taken place between the various organisers and top religious leaders across the world. The original agenda of the meeting was to discuss the plan and topics for the virtual conference this year but it diverted into being one about the COVID19 virus and its devastating effects.
In a never before series of events, the meeting was also attended by some of the official heads of major world religions. Despite multiple attempts to reveal the names, our source refused but did say that the names were as big as they could get.
Read the full article at: http://thedailyvanilla.com/2021/05/01/parliament-of-the-worlds-religions-admits-that-religion-has-lost-the-fight-against-covid19/