Hello, I hope all is going well to those who are reading my blog.
Recently, I have been reading a book called American Dervish and it is about this boy who struggles with his study of his religion, which is Islam. I have been thinking a lot about religion due to the very nature of this book. I am a protestant and I tend to be open-minded about studying other religions to understand their beliefs.
This book has caused me to question a lot of what is going on this world right now with religion and religion in the past. Right now there is fighting going on between the Sunnis and the Shiites, which is the equivalent to the fighting that occurred between Catholics and Protestants. It took a long time for Catholics and Protestants to accept that there is no use in fighting over religion because it is difficult to change the way one wants to practice religion for God.
I sincerely hope that one day the Sunnis and Shiites can live together in peace with one another by accepting that they are going to follow different practices when worshiping Allah. I think the beginning steps would be for those who are moderate when it comes to religion to stop letting extremists destroy people and their living areas. They need to take the power from the extremists who are causing all of this destruction. These extremists are terrible for the people living their locally and internationally because they are destroying peoples lives.
There will always be conflict when it comes to religion. There are Protestants and Catholics who fight each other sometimes over religion. We are never going to get rid of the conflict over religion, but we can reduce the destruction and problems that these extremists are causing by helping moderate believers from both sides gain power.
We as a world need to learn that the world cannot be all one religion or one set of beliefs when it comes to politics. We have to learn how to coexist with one another regardless of the conflicting beliefs. We need to derail extremists, which will lower the destruction that they are causing in this world.
