by Danielle Zinn

Created on: March 23, 2010

Truth journeys. Journeys in search of truth—that’s what our lives are. All humans have built in truth seekers—we long for truth and embrace it when we find it. Truth is essential in discussions and dialoguing. In order to have a meaningful dialogue with someone, truth needs to be emphasized. How often do we have those meaningless conversations of normality? For example: “How are you?” “I’m fine. You?” “Oh, fine. The weather’s been great today.” “Yeah. Well, I’ll see you later.” “Later.” These are not the most exciting discussions ever. We need to dare to dig deeper, to go beyond the shallow surface, especially in interreligious dialogues.  

When conversing with people of different faiths, we need to set the goal of digging past the cliché and sugarcoated ideas of the religions. Finding the truth hidden in the depths of many beliefs is essential for valuable, meaningful interreligious dialogue. The ability to get beyond these fluffed up, let’s-be-happy-ideas in religions is necessary. As I am a Christian, I will give an example from the perspective of my personal faith. When discussing beliefs, if I were to only mention the beautiful salvation given by the grace of God and encourage people to accept His love and live after death with God—who wouldn’t want have that? Who doesn’t desire to someone to love them and to live after death in the perfect place? However, a key belief in my faith was left out—the painful truth that all humans have sinned and are in need of cleansing. Can you tell the difference between the two? In the first instance I would possibly intrigue people by my faith, but if they decided to look more into my religion, they would find I left out a key belief in my religion. In the second instance, I shared the hard stuff to gulp down as well, so that they could know the core beliefs of my religion, not only one belief. I am not saying that we always need to say the difficult things first, but we need to practice discernment when conversing with people of other religions. This means we need to move away from sugarcoating our religions and simply share our beliefs as they truly are. When we keep ourselves from presenting and discussing sugarcoated ideas, the path has opened up for us to dig deeper.

Seeking truth also includes throwing off biases and laying down assumptions before entering an interreligious dialogue

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