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Arne Fjeldstad: My main concern is lack of tolerance toward religious expressions

As Christian Telegraph has reported earlier, parents representing students who feel their religious rights have been violated by school policy have filed a lawsuit against Santa Rosa County school officials for exerting "subtle coercive pressures" to accept their personal religious beliefs by creating prayerful environments at official functions.

Arne Fjeldstad, CEO of Oxford Centre for Religion and Public Life, gave his comments on this news: “Well, such law suits are never easy to deal with. Being a European myself, I often wonder why there is so little tolerance in so many societies in relationship to values. Tolerance is often touted as the most important value, yet expressions of Christian faith are not particularly well tolerated in many societies.”

“I think one always needs to pay attention to a country's history and in many cases this involves a special position for the Christian faith as is the case in many European societies. There may be very practical reasons for schools using churches, for example, because of acoustics, not having large public halls to gather all the students or pupils, a particular educational session on the impact of Christianity to the society, etc.”

“Also, there is a distinct difference between having school officials (headmaster, teachers, etc) do a speech or a prayer and having a fellow student, for example, perform a prayer. We always need to have a greater freedom to allow fellow students express their faith as a part of tolerating religious expressions in a society as well as in schools.”

“My main concern is the tendency to an increasing lack of tolerance toward religious expressions in public life by people who, in the name of tolerance, want to restrict Christians (and often Jews, too) to express their faith while they deem, for example, Muslim prayers 'cultural'. In any democratic society the value of freedom of speech, including religious prayers, must always be tolerated regardless of what faith they express. This is the very hallmark of democracy and real tolerance.”

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TAGS: Arne Fjeldstad Oxford Centre for Religion and Public Life Europe tolerance Christian faith freedom of speech religious expression Santa Rosa County school lawsuit

[09/03/2008]

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