Cultures of Peace and Communities of Faith
Religious community runs their lives according to the values of the religion they adhere. For most adherents, religion is something that is taken for granted. People usually get their religion with all set of values and the understanding way of it from their parents and community. Muslim society in Indonesia for example, they recognize two major organizations that is Muhammadia and Nahdlatul Ulama (NU). A person who was born in NU community, he or she will follow the culture and the way of understanding Islam that is usually done by Nahdliyyin (NU members) and this seems to be happened in any other communities. In fact the community did this intentionally to keep the tradition alive and perpetuated it to their descendant.
Nowadays we frequently heard news about clashed mass almost happened all over the world and every day. Something jumped into my mind when I heard this kind of news. Why people do so? Religion supposed to bring peace rather than violence or brutality. I finally found the answer that is lied in the media releases the news itself. Media have very widely broad in scale of conveying ideas to the audiences or spectators. These media have chances to generate culture, either the good one on conversely to the bad one.
Religious teaching or tenet itself generated two conflicting images of how to practice the faith. One image is of an embattled community of believers surrounded by enemies with evil ways. This community called to holly war by divine command, by God, who will lead His people to victory. The second image is of community of believers living at peace with neighbors, called by a loving God to deal non violently with other peoples when conflict arise, prepare to practice forgiveness and reconciliation and to live roo for other ways of thinking, believing and acting. The component of struggle in this image is in the inward struggle to achieve goodness, virtue, compassion (Elise Boulding, p. 96).
Living in happiness is generally the ideal of human lives. A peaceful civilized society is an idea that worth to battle for. By using any tools or instruments available surrounding us including medias, we could possibly generate and cultivate a peaceful culture. Since we realize that in religious teaching there are two images like what Elise Boulding explained above, why don’t we generate and spread goodness values of the religion over the violence or brutality. We could start it from now on and from our closest persons in the community. [ ]
