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Our Mission
Pave the Way Foundation is
dedicated to achieving peace by closing the gap in tolerance,
education and the practical relations between religions, through cultural, technological and
intellectual exchanges. We strive to eliminate the use of religion
as a tool which, historically has been used, by some, to achieve
personal agendas and to cause conflicts.
Through our inter-religious projects of
identification and elimination of obstacles and our concrete
gestures of good will, we utilize our earned level of trust,
in order to "pave the way" towards improving inter-religious
relations and by encouraging intra-religious relations. We task the
faithful of all beliefs that the true danger to international
peace is the extremists that exist within every faith.
The Vision of Pave the Way
Throughout
history and today, people commit unspeakable acts of violence in the name of religion. Today, with weapons of mass
destruction becoming available, the very survival of the human race
itself is in considerable peril.
The religions
preach the love of peace, charity, forgiveness and understanding. However, many
religious zealots distort the common message of all the faiths, in
order to push their own political, economic or misguided religious agenda.
This distortion results in
hatred, bigotry and violence. These extremists exist in every
religion, and it is the religions themselves, which must assume the
responsibility for their creation. Currently, the religions are
collectively silent about this violence, leaving the governments to
deal with the results. The governments cannot tell a zealot that he
is not going to paradise for his acts, only the religious leaders
can refute to these distortions. Unfortunately, the inter-religious
dialogues that have been sponsored by many well meaning
organizations, between ministers, rabbis and imams and the like, have simply not
filtered down to the every day person or even to their
congregations.
Pave the Way
Foundation is committed to ending religious hatred and
intolerance by removing the tool of “religion” from those who will
use it for malevolent purposes. We have taken and continue to take
decisive steps to educate the every day person. We promote projects
which have demonstrated enormous historic gestures of good will.
When the “silent majority” learns the truth, they will act
rationally, rethink past hatreds, oppose stereotypical lies and act
with tolerance for their fellow man.
We hope to
motivate the every day person not to just sit there and say "tsk,
tsk, tsk" after reading their morning paper - do something! Your
life, your family, and the survival of the whole human race may very
well be at stake.
One must be careful not to trust everything
they read in the paper or see on television. We encourage everyone
to seek out the unbiased facts about any story before rendering an
opinion. Mark Twain once wrote "If you do not read newspapers
you are uninformed. If you do read newspapers you are
misinformed." The philosophy of how we
have achieved our successes at PTWF can be summed up in this fact of
problem solving: "If there is a problem somewhere, this is what
happens. Three people will try to do something concrete to settle
the issue. Ten people will give a lecture analyzing what the three
are doing. One hundred people will condemn or commend the ten for
their lecture. One thousand people will argue about the problem. And
one-person -only one- will involve himself so deeply in the true
solution that he is too busy to listen to any of it."
Fr. Elias
Chacour- Israeli Priest and First Palestinian to graduate Hebrew
University
"The world is not dangerous because of those who do harm but
because of those who look at it without doing anything."
– Albert Einstein, physicist
Embrace our similarities Savor
our differences.
The meaning of our slogan is simple. We must
embody the messages of charity, love, and responsibility for every
human being, common to all of our faiths, our beliefs and to the
code of human behavior. We focus on our similarities and savor our
differences by learning, through the positive and practical
appreciation of the World's diverse religions and beliefs. We must
not allow the differences to poison us, with bigotry, hatred, and
intolerance. Instead, we wish to learn, enhance our own beliefs and
in turn savor our differences.
"the problem that exists today is that the people of the world have just enough
religion to hate one another and not enough to love one another"
Jonathan Swift- Anglican Theologian (1667-1745) nothing has changed
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