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| Jeffrey K. Hadden & Douglas E. Cowan, "Religion and the Social Order, Volume 8: Religion on the Internet: Research prospects and promises," JAI/Elsevier Science. Read reviews or order this book safely from Amazon.com online book store |
The essay contains many accounts of the blind alleys that we went down during the history of the OCRT. New webmasters may wish to read it and avoid some of our mistakes.
Initiating events:
The concept of an Internet web site devoted to religious tolerance was triggered by three events in the spring of 1995:
- The war in Bosnia Herzegovina: The TV evening news reported at least one new atrocity every day from part of the former Yugoslavia. No matter which network we watched, the war was continually described as an "ethnic" conflict. I was angered at this, believing it to be actually a religious disagreement, driven by intolerance of other faiths. Yugoslavia is located between the Roman Catholic and Eastern Orthodox spheres of influence. It was also sandwiched between countries whose main religions were Islam and Christianity. So, although the people of the country were of one ethnic origin, they followed three different faith traditions: Islam, Roman Catholicism and Serbian Orthodox Christianity. Various political leaders capitalized upon the religious frictions in the country to pursue their nationalist aims. And so, the world watched the most atrocious attempts at religiously motivated genocide, including a return of European death camps. Prevention of more Bosnias in the future, requires the promotion of religious tolerance, and a general understanding of the evil acts that religious belief can sometimes generate.
- My age: I was approaching the age of 60, nearing the end of my professional life as an electronics/computer engineer at a large multi-national company. I recalled my father’s experience at this age. He was a bank executive and observed many of his contemporary co-workers retire to a life of leisure only to die within months. Retirement can be a life threatening transition. It seemed that those pensioners who kept their mind challenged lived the longest. "Use it or lose it" appears to apply to the human brain as well as to other organs. I had been looking for some type of challenging, demanding project, in the hopes of having a long and intellectually active retirement. Religion and/or spirituality seemed like a likely area in which to specialize. I had been fascinated with both since my mid-teens.
- My religious faith: When I was born, my parents were Baptists. The family switched to the United Church of Canada a few years later. (The United Church of Canada is a liberal denomination, similar to the United Church of Christ in the U.S.) In my late teens, I experienced a religious conversion, and joined the First Unitarian Congregation in Toronto. The Unitarians are one of the most liberal religious organizations in North America. Some might describe this life history as a gradual slide towards an eternity being roasted by the fires of Hell. One effect of these transitions was to develop a heightened concern for human rights. Members of both the United and Unitarian churches are particularly active in this area, promoting equal liberty and justice for all.
One project that showed promise was a World Wide Web (WWW) site to promote religious tolerance. This would be an important project, because religious intolerance is a root cause of many of the world’s small-scale wars and civil disturbances. E.g. Bosnia, Cyprus, East Timor, India, Kosovo, the Middle East, Nigeria, Northern Ireland, Pakistan, the Philippines, Sri Lanka, Sudan, and others. There would be a lot less killing in the world if people would become tolerant of other religions. In time, the public might actually be able to go beyond tolerance and actually value religious diversity.
The Internet, and particularly the World Wide Web, was still in its infancy in early 1995. However, it was growing at a furious rate. From about 130 web sites in mid-1993, it had expanded to about 20,000 sites in the spring of 1995. 1 A scan of the WWW using the Lycos search engine produced only four hits for the phrase religious tolerance: two were essays by members of the Baha'i Faith; one was by a Baptist minister; the fourth described religious tolerance in ancient Egypt. A site promoting tolerance seemed to be an ideal project: There was a need for religious tolerance throughout the world -- a need that was not being met by the then existing web sites.
Starting the OCRT web site:
I signed up for Internet access through a local Internet Service Provider (ISP) in Kingston ON Canada during 1995-MAY. The web site was assigned a directory on one of their computers with a rather complex name: http://www.kosone.com/people/ocrt/. This was a computer directory that was normally reserved for individuals rather than companies. I anticipated relatively little traffic on our web site -- a level of activity closer to that of a personal web site than of an organizational site. Being rather naïve with Internet technology, ocrt_hp.htm was selected as a file name for the main home page. The site’s full URL thus became: http://www.kosone.com/people/ocrt/ocrt_hp.htm. A standard default file name like index.htm or welcome.htm would have been much better. When a standard name is used, file name does not have to be included in the address. That would have shortened our total URL considerably to: http://www.kosone.com/people/ocrt.
Inexperience led to a second error. At the start-up of the web site, I did not consider renting a full domain name, like the one that we eventually selected: http://www.religioustolerance.org. A full domain name has certain advantages:
- It is easier for visitors to remember.
- It is transferable from one ISP to another.
- It looks more impressive to visitors.
We soon switched to another ISP, Canlink Interactive Technologies. Our new URL was http://web.canlink.com/ocrt/ocrt_hp.htm. This move left hundreds of orphan kosone listings in various search engines. Even now, about four years later, the Google search engine lists about 145 hits for our original kosone URLs -– all broken links. 2
We strongly urge that people who are starting up a web site give their home page a default file name like index.htm, and rent a full domain name before start-up.
Starting up the OCRT group:
From the beginning, I felt that the OCRT should be a multi-faith group, whose members followed as broad a sampling of religious faiths and theological positions as possible. Our group would be living proof that persons from a wide range of theological beliefs can cooperate on a religious project. I am an Agnostic. Another member is an Atheist. Two friends, a Christian and a Wiccan rounded out the Ontario Consultants. (Wicca is a Neopagan religion, which resembles Native American spirituality, but is based on ancient Celtic Pagan beliefs.) We decided from the beginning that we would not publish the names of the group members, other than that of the coordinator. That is because of the high level of animosity in North America by some very devout, very intelligent but terribly misinformed religious conservatives towards Wicca. Although Wicca is a gentle and spiritual faith, many misguided individuals link it to the witchcraft and Satan worship hoax of the late Middle Ages and Renaissance. Books filled with misinformation about Wicca can be found in most Christian bookstores. This hatred has been responsible for arson and economic attacks against two Wiccans in our city. We felt that name confidentiality would give our Wiccan member some degree of safety.
The next task was to select a name for the organization. "Ontario Centre for Religious Tolerance" (OCRT) had a nice ring to it. Since our original goals were small, we initially expected no significant expenses and no revenue. We did not even bother to register the name with the government as an agency or business. The web site was treated more as a personal hobby of its coordinator than an actual agency. In case we later wanted to register the OCRT with the government of Ontario, we arranged search of all of the businesses and agencies in the province. There was only one organization that included the word "tolerance" in its name. It was a high-quality machine shop that made precision metal parts. By using "Ontario" as a prefix, we were fairly confident that we would not conflict with any other existing agency working in the religious tolerance field – unless of course they happened to be located in a region of California that is also called Ontario.
In late 1996, we were asked by Lucent Technologies, the former Bell Laboratories, to visit their facility in Columbus OH and deliver a lecture on religious tolerance. This would involve some financial transactions, as they offered to pay for our out-of-pocket travelling expenses. The OCRT then required a bank account in order to cash Lucent’s check. However, we could only open a bank account if the group had been first registered with the Government of Ontario. Creating a legal organization as a non-profit agency is a rather involved process in Ontario, involving the creation of a constitution, a community board, etc. So, we registered the OCRT as a sole proprietorship – an organization that theoretically could generate a profit. This only takes a few minutes of time and payment of a modest fee. Unfortunately, the government ministry refused to register our suggested name because they reserve the term centre for non-profit organizations. They suggested consultants instead. So the Ontario Centre for Religious Tolerance became the Ontario Consultants on Religious Tolerance. In retrospect, a much shorter name would have been preferable.
Developing the OCRT mandate, goals and principles of operation:
These were derived from our beliefs about organized religion. As stated on our home page:
Religion is a unique force in society. It promotes both good and evil. Historically, it has helped to abolish slavery. It has promoted racial integration, equal rights for women, and equal rights for gays and lesbians. It has motivated individuals to create massive support services for the poor, the sick, the hurting, and the broken. Conversely, it has been used to justify slavery, racial segregation, oppression of women, discrimination against homosexuals, genocide, massive crimes against humanity, extermination of minorities, and other horrendous evils.
Religion drives some to dedicate their lives to help the poor and needy. (E.g. Gandhi, Albert Schweitzer, Mother Teresa.) It drives others to exterminate as many "heretics" as they can. Consider the mass murders and genocides in Bosnia, East Timor, India, Korea, Kosovo, the Middle East, Northern Ireland, Philippines, Sri Lanka, Sudan, Tibet, etc.
Religion has the capability to generate unselfish love in some people, and vicious, raw hatred in others.
Most religious web sites portray a glowing picture of religion – particularly of their own faith. Most skeptic and free-thinker web sites describe faith in negative terms. We felt that our mandate would be to describe religion and religious ideas objectively, from all points of view. So, we explain abortion from both the pro-life, medical and pro-choice sides. We explain homosexuality from the gay/lesbian, therapist and religious conservative points of view.
We identified three main areas of religious intolerance:
- That directed from persons of one faith group against another (e.g. by a Christian Identity group against Roman Catholics).
- That directed from persons of one faith group against a secular group (e.g. by a religious group against gays and lesbians).
- That directed from persons in a secular group against a faith group (e.g. by freethinkers against Christians)
Our goal is to eventually cover the entire field of religious tolerance, with clarity, accuracy and balance. We decided to concentrate on the United States and Canada as our main catchment area. We decided to concentrate our effort in four main areas:
- Promoting religious tolerance:
Two of our members have worked in professions where precision in the use of language is of great concern. One was a professional engineer; another is a registered nurse. Misunderstandings can cause bridges to fall down, and patients to die from incorrect medication. With these personal backgrounds, the ambiguity of many religious terms came as a great surprise to us. Words such as Christian, Witch, God, and messiah have been given multiple definitions by different groups; some of these meanings are mutually exclusive. The term religious tolerance is no exception:
- Some believe that a person is only religiously tolerant when they consider that all religious are equally valid, or that they believe that all faith traditions provide different paths to the same God. This definition is difficult to support, because various religions have entirely different concepts of God; various faith groups teach that there are 0, 1, 2, 3 or many deities, some male, some female.
- Others define that a person is religiously tolerant when they consider all religions and faith groups as equally "good." Again, this makes little sense, because some religions teach their followers to hate minorities and commit acts of violence against them, while other faith groups stress inclusiveness, love and acceptance. Some religious traditions promote racism, sexism and homophobia while others stress acceptance of diversity.
- We define the term differently. We view it as a civil rights issue: Religious tolerance requires that a person value freedom of expression, assembly and belief for followers of all religious traditions – even those beliefs and practices that differ from the person’s own faith. Religious tolerance is guaranteed by Articles 13, 14, and 15 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Unfortunately, although the countries of the world have signed this declaration, none have effectively implemented it universally.
In the late 20th century, there have been one lynching, one attempted mass murder by stoning, many fire bombings, shootings, physical assaults and economic attacks by some very devout, well meaning, but terribly misinformed people in North America who have victimized followers of minority religions. Outbreaks of anti-Semitism continue to plague both the US and Canada and seems to be on the rise around the world. Muslims are badly misrepresented in most media accounts; the term Jihad is perhaps the most misunderstood religious term. 5 Conservative Christians are often discriminated against in job hiring and promotion. Children have been seized from families on the basis of a child-care worker's misinformed beliefs about the parent's religion. Parents have been prohibited from visiting their own children because of a judge's religious bias. These injustices need to be exposed.
- Disseminating information on "hot" religious topics.
These are matters over which various religious groups are in conflict with each other and with secular forces in society. This is not a new phenomenon. It has been with us ever since the time when Galileo was persecuted – perhaps before. Only the topics change. Current examples are: access to abortion; equal treatment of women; equal rights (including the right to marry) and protection for gays and lesbians; the debate between creation science and evolution; differing views on human sexuality, corporal punishment of children, etc. Here, our goal is to provide objective background information; explain the beliefs of all groups involved in the debate; cite applicable Biblical passages and describe how conservative and liberal Christians have interpreted them; and list statements by professional organizations, where available.
- Disseminating accurate religious information:
We try to provide clear, balanced, objective and complete descriptions of the beliefs, rituals, symbols, and political goals of many faith traditions. We attempt to have them reviewed by at least three of their followers before publishing them on our web site.
Our site concentrates largely on the Christian religion, because about 87% of Americans and Canadians identify themselves with that religion. The membership of the next largest organized religions, Islam and Judaism, include only one or two percent of the population. We also give priority to those minority faith groups that have been the target of misinformation and disinformation campaigns in North America. These include The Church of Scientology, The Family, Jehovah’s Witnesses, Mormons, Unification Church, Wiccans and others. By informing people about various religions (and counteracting misinformation spread by others) we hope that understanding and tolerance will increase, while bigotry will decrease. We also hope that our readers will better identify the good and evil practices in their own faith tradition, and be motivated to maximize the good and minimize such evils as racism, sexism, religious intolerance and homophobia.
- Exposing religious fraud, hatred and misinformation.
There is enormous misinformation and disinformation to be found in textbooks, reference books, on the Internet and in the media about religion. Some is intentional religious propaganda; much is simple repetition of ancient stereotypes. Neither the official Internet sites of religious denominations nor the sites of their detractors generally give accurate information. Official sites tend to gloss over the negative activities of their faith group – particularly events from the past. Many of the webmasters that attack specific religions seem to have little regard for truth or historical accuracy.
Sponsored link:
Our "Rules of Engagement"
Promotion of religious belief:
Unlike almost all religious WWW sites, we do not advocate any one religion. We also do not advocate secularism as superior to religion. However, we do promote human rights.Criticism and Opposition:
Our policy is to not criticize any person or organized religion for their theological beliefs. However we do censure individuals and groups for any actions that harm people, limit their personal freedoms, or restrict their spiritual, mental, religious and emotional growth.Respecting privacy:
Many faith groups including The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, the Church of Scientology, and some groups within Ceremonial Magick, Wicca, and Satanism attempt to keep some information about their beliefs and rituals secret from the public. They only release knowledge gradually to their members, as they advance in training. Although some of this information has been published (often by violating copyright) we do not contribute to its dissemination.Because our expected audience is about 85% American, 10% Canadian and 5% other English speakers, we decided to use "American" rather than "English" spelling. The occasional "colour, favour, centre", etc. does creep through accidentally. We found it useful to have almost all of the writing done by one individual. This gives an overall consistency to our web site.
We express dates in the form: 2000-FEB-28. This decision led one person to accuse us of being members of the Church of Scientology. They noted that we used the same unusual date format as did L. Ron Hubbard, Scientology’s founder. Actually this style is fairly common outside of the U.S.; it is clear and unambiguous, and easy for computers to sort. It avoids one of the most serious adverse effects of the millennium. Notations such as 1/2/3 can refer to many dates, from 2001-FEB-3 to 2003-FEB-1.
We designed the site using the standard pyramid menu structure: Although the home page allows the visitor to select one of a few important essays, its main purpose is to guide the visitor to one of 12 menus. Each menu covers a single section, like Christianity, other religions, spirituality, religious laws, religious information, etc. These menus, in turn, are generally linked to individual essays on specific topics. We use three page layouts: one for the main home page, one for menus and one for individual essays. We expected that this structure would help our visitors navigate our site. We were surprised to find that most of our visitors bypassed the menu structure entirely. They come from an Internet search engine directly into one of the essays on our web site. Generally, they do not visit the home page itself.
As the web site grew to beyond 500 menus and essays, our readers experienced increasing difficulty finding specific essays. We added an internal search engine so that they can more easily find our essays that dealt with the particular topic in which they are interested. This gave us two added benefits. The commercial search engine that we link to pays us a few cents whenever a visitor performs a search. Also, we can obtain a list of the most common search strings that our visitors use. This tells us a great deal about their interests. It helps us prioritize essay upgrades and the creation of new essays.
Creating the HTML coding:
HTML means HyperText Markup Language. (It is pronounced by saying each letter rather than "hitamull"). HTML is a series of codes that the webmaster imbeds in text in order to control the appearance of the resultant web page. HTML coding used to be easily inserted manually. There were relatively few HTML code tags to remember. For example, a paragraph is created by placing <p> at the beginning of some text and </p> at its end. <hl> generated a horizontal line. <br> generates a new line. <h1> and </h1> define a heading in large characters. <i> and </i> bracket italicized text, while <b> and </b> generate bold text. We originally learned HTML by buying an introductory book on the topic, and studying the source code of a few web sites. In those days, one merely fired up a simple text editor, wrote the text, and inserted the HTML1.0 codes as needed.
In late 1994, the Netscape Navigator browser was introduced; it added many new tags that were not recognized by the other browsers. This made web sites visually more exciting and gave the webmaster better control over the site’s appearance. However, when we started our web site in 1995, we decided to stick with basic HTML 1.0 and avoid the Netscape enhancements. Otherwise our pages would look really strange on some of our visitors’ older browsers. The other browsers later caught up with Netscape, and the latter’s extensions became standard HTML. By early 2000, the commonly used browsers can handle just about any reasonable web site coding. However, the same web page will look somewhat different on each browser. It is important for the webmaster to view their final coding on both Netscape Navigator and Microsoft Internet Explorer in order to make certain that their pages will look attractive to all visitors.
We eventually purchased the Microsoft â FrontPage â program. It is a special purpose, advanced WYSIWYG (What You See is What You Get) word processor that is designed to produce web pages. By 1998, our version of FrontPage became noticeably sluggish on our Intel-based 486 computer, when we reached the 600 essay level. This was initially overcome by dividing our essays alphabetically into three equal-sized, partial web-sites on our office computer. These separate web-sites are combined into a single site on our Internet Hosting Service’s computer.
FrontPage has a built-in theme function that simplifies graphic design of a web site. Each theme has a color-coordinated background image, a set of character fonts and colors, a set of small icons for lists, etc. We selected the Expedition theme for our menus, and the Nature theme for our individual essays. We upgraded FrontPage with new versions when they became available. FrontPage 2000 has a running spell-checker that prevents most of our spelling errors. Our grammatical constructions, punctuation, etc remain quite awful. We are indebted to some of our visitors who have helped us in this area.
One problem with web page design is that our visitors own a range of monitor sizes. They also use a wide variety of screen area settings on their monitor(s). A web page may be difficult to read on some combinations of area settings and monitor sizes. Some lines may be wider than small monitors can display; this causes horizontal scroll bars to appear. The visitor then has to move the bars back and forth in order to read each line. Alternatively, lines may stretch out on large displays that they are difficult to read. After some experimentation, we decided to contain each essay and menu within a HTML table that is set to have a width equal to 85% of the reader’s display width. Each essay and menu then adapts reasonably well to the reader’s monitor.
Our home page is of traditional design. It contains a graphic that identifies our group. This is the traditional dove symbol carrying something in its beak – a universal symbol of peace and toleration. Under the graphic are some words of introduction to our site. A table of topics on the left side contains hyperlinks to various menus: e.g. Christianity, other religions, spiritual topics, religious hatred, "hot" topics, etc. As of 2000-FEB, we have added some special features to our home page. All were obtained at no cost:
- A message board that acts as a forum for our visitors; it helps to build a community spirit among ourselves and our visitors. They are free to post any thoughts there, and to respond to the postings of others. This is an unmoderated list; there is no person in charge that censors postings before they appear on the message board. Usually religious message boards tend to fill up quickly with a lot of hate-filled postings on "hot" religious topics like homosexuality, hell, salvation, and abortion. Ours has been more successful. We believe that this is because bigots rarely visit our web site and thus do not find our message board.
- A hyperlink to The Hunger Site. Our visitors can click on this hyperlink and donate food to hungry people worldwide. The Hunger Site’s sponsors pick up the bill.
- Banners from paying advertisers.
- A HitBox.com image. They track traffic to the world’s 1,000 most visited web sites in each of about 50 categories. This is a very useful link, because HitBox provides all sorts of statistical data on the web site. Over time, our site has risen in popularity. HitBox registers us as the most-visited religious site on the Internet.
- A hit counter that counts the number of visitors to our home page. The number of visitors to our entire site is much larger, as almost all visitors bypass our home page and are directed to a specific essay from a search engine.
- A graphic that allows a visitor to send a standard Email to a friend, recommending that they surf our site.
- A provision for translating our pages into another language.
We originally received no outside funding from any source. But then our numbers of hits spiralled upwards, and our Internet Service Provider started to charge excess throughput penalties. We started to seek sources of funding. They currently are: donations by cash, checks, money orders, charges on U.S. visitor’s telephone bill via a 900 number, and credit cards. We have created a "300 club" for visitors to our site who are willing to have $5.00 in U.S. funds charged on their credit card every 30 days. The latter is a major source of funding. We also sell banner ad space on the home page and our religions menu. We obtain commissions from book sales on Amazon.com that are referred from our site.
Our current main source of income is the banner ads that we have placed on most of our busy essays and menus. These are provided by companies such as AdClix, AdVance, Advertising.com, Eads, Datacom and ValueClick. One of these companies pays us a small commission every time that the banner is displayed. The cost is normally expressed in CPM (cost in dollars per thousand impressions). All of the companies pay us a small commission for each "click-through." This occurs when a viewer clicks on a banner and moves to the advertiser's web site. Most banner ad companies pay 10 to 24 cents U.S. for each click-through. They pay nothing for each viewing of the banner. Only about 0.3% to 1% of the readers typically click on a given banner. The critical factor to the webmaster is the number of cents per page view. Most banner ad companies supply the average click through rate (the percentage of times that our visitor clicks on a banner) and the number of cents paid per click. From these data, we compute the number of cents paid per 1000 impressions. This value typically ranges between $0.40 and $1.00. We keep at least a few ads from each of five companies on our web site so that we can estimate the cents paid per 1000 impressions. Then, we move most of our pages’ banner ads to the two companies that pay the highest rate.
Our major expense is the monthly bill for web hosting. This runs many hundreds of dollars per month, depending upon the actual traffic. Next are office supplies, including religious books for our library. By staffing the OCRT with unpaid volunteers, no salaries are paid. Still, the OCRT has been, overall, a money-losing proposition since its start-up in 1995 until early 1999. Sufficient profit was probably made in 1999 to offset the losses in previous years.
It is our goal to put the OCRT on a firm financial footing so that it will survive into the future, past the lifetimes of its current members. We would also like to hire paid staff. We currently have four volunteers that contribute the equivalent of about two full time staff positions. Since start-up, they have donated almost 4 person-years of effort, equivalent to about $160,000. In order to update our present essays, write new essays and respond to the influx of Emails, we estimate that we would need a total staff of about 3. Our plan is to first reorganize the group as a non-profit agency. This would make it possible for us to apply for grants from foundations and religious denominations. Unfortunately, we will not be able to obtain permission from Revenue Canada to issue tax-exemption certificates for most of our donors’ charitable contributions. Canada and the United States do not recognize cross-border charitable contributions. An additional complication is that Revenue Canada will not register religious groups as charitable agencies unless the latter teach the existence of a deity.
Webmasters of religious sites can expect to receive a great amount of unsolicited Emails from their readers. We receive about two negative letters each day. Some can be considered hate letters. We receive a few death threats each year. Of the very critical Emails that we have received since start-up five years ago, we can recall:
- One letter that came from a conservative Sikh who complained that we had misrepresented the source of his religion. Our essay stated that most historians believe that Sikhism is a syncretistic religion, blending Islam with Hinduism. We also explained that traditional Sikhs believe that their religion is not related to any other religion but was revealed by God. The visitor threatened to lodge a formal complaint against us with a human rights body unless we deleted the first statement. We refused to follow his request.
- A series of letters came from a conservative Muslim who was very seriously distressed at what he felt were errors in our essay. We were able to resolve his concerns.
- We received three letters from Satanists who were angry that we had published a section on Satanic Ritual Abuse (SRA). We pointed out to each of them that the SRA essays described it as a hoax. Two of them wrote back, apologizing for their Emails.
- Almost all of the remaining very negative letters came from conservative Christians. We have probably received about 3,000 by now. Our favorites describe how we and our children are going to burn in hell because of what we have written. We collected some of the more interesting Emails, both positive and negative, and placed them on-line. 6
- Many letters question our theological credentials. We explain that we are not religious innovators; we are simply reporters on religion, spirituality and ethics. A formal theological degree or bible school diploma would be counter-productive. It would tend to bias our understanding of religious matters in either a liberal or conservative direction. The post-secondary education that we have taken has trained us in the skills that we need as reporters: analytical thinking and the ability to express thoughts clearly.
Conclusions:
The OCRT began as little more than a hobby. It has grown to be a full-time assignment for one of our volunteers, and a part-time task for the others. We hope that it will expand further to become a sustainable agency that will endure into the future.
References:
- "Web growth summary," at: http://www.mit.edu/people/mkgray/net/web-growth-summary.html
- Google, our favorite search engine, is at: http://www.google.com
- The text of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights is at: http://www.un.org/Overview/rights.html
- The Ontario Consultants on Religious Tolerance web site is at http://www.religioustolerance.org
- "Jihad" does not mean "holy war." It refers to a personal, internal struggle with one's imperfections. The goal may be achievement in a profession, self-purification, the conquering of primitive instincts or the attainment of some other noble goal.
- "Comments from our readers," are at comments.htm
Copyright © 2000 by Ontario Consultants on Religious
Tolerance
Originally written: 2000-MAR-1
Latest update: 2000-MAR-1
Author: B.A. Robinson
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