This is a long way from the times when Cathars were persecuted for their faith, when Jews suffered the Holocaust, when Catholics fought with Protestants; and shows a definite increase on our levels of tolerance for other religions and traditions.
However, there are some that say that such tolerance goes against your own religious beliefs. What they mean to say is if your religious teaching reveals that your tradition is the only way to eternal life, how can you then say other religions can also lead to eternal life - either you believe that your religion is the truth or it isn't!
Personally, I think that this increasing tolerance is a very good sign and we should work to be even more tolerant of other ideas, faiths, traditions and thoughts! Does it matter that we may all believe different things as long as we decide what it is that we believe and work to deepen our own beliefs.
There is one section of the article that does really annoy me though and it's where it says
The Catholic church teaches that "one church of Christ...subsists in the Catholic Church" alone and that Protestant churches, while defective, can be "instruments of salvation"Surely these two religions are not so far apart as, say, Buddhism and Catholicism? In which case, I might have had more sympathy for such an outrageous statement. Despite the history between the Protestant and Catholic religions, the two are surely closer than that statement would suggest! Both religions use the same Bible, teach the same Holy Trinity, celebrate the same religious dates, and so on.
Thus I believe that it is statements like that that are more damaging than it is to suggest that many people believe that there is more than one way to eternal life. Which at least shows that we are more open-minded and willing to accept that ours is not the only way. As the Rev. C. Welton Gaddy is quoted in the article this shows "a level of humility about religion that would be of great benefit to everyone".
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