RELIGIOUS PLURALISM AND ITS PSYCHO-PHILOSOPHICAL APPROACH AND RELEVANCE

Résumé

With the upsurge of religious intolerance, violence and conflict, and coping with conflicting and disharmony of religious beliefs and imposition of false or faulty doctrines and foreign faiths, there is an urgent need to check or re-evaluate the modes, practice and absurdity of religious convictions which are plausibly evidenced in the domain of religious fanaticism and fundamentalism. With conflicts, peace and justice are denied, and if these are not realised, meaningful development is utopic, even when God is called upon. Hence, the paper explicated the valuation of religious pluralism which seems to suggest the accommodation of religious freedom and tolerance of beliefs or convictions that are situated in the respect of human rights and dignity. In religious freedom, God is expressed in faith and worship in accordance with individual conviction and understanding of the “Beingness” and personhood of God. The paper concluded that adherents of religions should allow the thriving of religious pluralism with its ingredients of religious freedom and respect for human rights and dignity against the weighty negative effects of religious fanaticism and fundamentalism, all for the attainment of integral human development that promotes the religiosity of the wholeness of human person.