Religious Pluralism and Peaceful Coexistence in Contemporary Global Societies

The concept of Religious pluralism has dimensional and conflicting disciplinary usages and slippages between the factual notion of plurality and normative accounts of pluralism”. Such, therefore, need necessary conceptual clarification if Religious Pluralism is to be understood. Pluralism can be given at least four different conceptual meanings. The first meaning is “Theological which assumes that other religious paths are true”. The second is sociological which simply accepts pluralism to mean religious plurality or diversity. Thirdly, pluralism is a “philosophical school known as value-pluralism in which values are irreducible plural. Value – pluralism does not per se concern itself about religion but intrinsically can lead to a philosophical argument for valuing diversity. The fourth concept of religious pluralism refers to a political ideal of peaceful interaction among individuals and groups of different religious faith including nonbelievers. Furthermore in this paper, religious pluralism was seen to bridge the gap between the different religious sect and how their adherents can peacefully coexist together for global peace, unity and development. This paper adopted historical, theological, sociological and philosophical approaches to bring out the clear and true picture of the reality of religious pluralism and global peace and development. The study therefore believed that every religion has not the sole claim of religious monopoly of access to the Creator in terms of salvation. This claim is true because the world is cosmically diverse and pluralistic, religiously socialistic with Muslims, Buddhist, Hindus, Christians, Taoists, traditional religionists, Judaism, etc all occupying the same religious space on earth. All religious claims to have reverence to one Supreme Being or the like in whom they are responsible to now or thereafter life is rather subjective than objective to the possessor of the claims. The method adopted for this study is the literature review. It was however concluded that religious pluralism if properly understood by adherents of different religion can bring about a peaceful co-existence between the adherents of different religion, thereby guaranteeing global peace and development.

Key words: Religious pluralism, peaceful coexistence, global peace and development.