COMMUNITY COMMENTARY:Respect, peace must be spiritual priorities

The reality of today's world is that we are living in a very precarious and unstable time. In every part of the world, there is some form of human conflict. As spiritual leaders it is our mission to try to comfort, assure and give hope to people. Our duty is to build within each soul the human qualities of love, respect and acceptance of others.

I believe that America has the potential to pollinate the fields of religious diversity within its land and carry it worldwide.

American religious leaders have already begun to cultivate relations by holding interfaith dialogue, visiting each other's places of worship, building joint academic and community ventures, and supporting one another through mutual reverence. Truly, many spiritual leaders are manifesting the theme of their divine book — the Koran, Torah and Bible — "love your neighbors as yourself."

It is not befitting of any spiritual leader, let alone a scholar, to manipulate a passage from the Koran to support a claim that Islam is "inimical" to Western values ("Irrational intolerance is a frightening reality," Spiritual Guidance, May 19).

For the sake of argument, one could easily apply the same elementary tactic to the Old Testament and New Testament. Would it be worthy of me, to extract out of context, selected cruel and inhumane passages from the Torah or Bible to validate that Jews and Christians also preach violence? How would that benefit me or the world that I live in? What sort of preaching or accuracy would I be promoting? We must stop spewing rhetoric that slanders a faith that is shared by more than a billion peaceful people.

Instead of finger-pointing, we must work together to find common grounds to develop solutions for the ongoing Palestinian-Israeli conflict. Spiritual leaders must not mirror the rage, animosity or prejudice seen in others but rather reflect the rays of ethical justice, compassion, understanding, forgiveness. And, most important, they must labor for a peaceful outcome. We must be able to provide a forum to genuinely listen to one another respectfully without insult or accusation.

Students of today must have the right leaders to model in order to ensure that they become rightful leaders of tomorrow.

It is our duty, as representatives of faith, to continue to reach out to others, to find amicable solutions through dialogue and to heal and strengthen the common bond of man.