I caught Larry King interviewing prominent representatives from the Islamic, Judaic, Buddhist and Christian faiths on the question of whether the tsunami disaster was a punishment from God.

(You would wish that Malaysian TV stations too, would hold an interfaith dialogue of this nature, seeing that we often boast of ourselves as a multi-religious nation living in harmony. But that is wishful thinking.)

Speaking with one voice to a world-wide audience on CNN, all those learned clerics from different faiths denied that one could ever know divine intension sufficiently to make judgement about one's fellow human beings on matters of heaven and hell. The Muslim cleric was particularly emphatic about the spirit of Islam in showing compassion for people not of the Islamic faith in the event of such natural catastrophes.

Thank God we will always have sane voices like those religious clerics who will keep matters of faith open to interpretive discussion, rather than reducing them to mere dogmatic exclusivist pronunciation of divine truth on behalf of the Supreme Being.

Unfortunately, we will always have some clerics and lay believers of different religions competing to speak as if they have monopoly on the Divine Truth.

Asked where they derive such intimate knowledge of the Divine Design, they would claim thorough knowledge of the holy books, quoting passages with ease from the many saying of various prophets, offering to recite even the Bible or the Koran from cover to cover.

Apparent contradictions

I truly admire people who spend long years studying the holy books out of deep religious devotion. The little I know about the sacred texts of various faiths has taught me that the wisdom offered in these texts is beyond anything that can be cooked up by our puny petty human mind.

The trouble is that all the holy books of the various faiths are such voluminous collection of the words of God revealed through the mouth of so many prophets and holy men. Inevitably there are apparent contradictions. There are inevitably those difficult and ambiguous sections which do not make normal sense.

In short, in theory at least, for any quotation that you offer as argument and evidence for your position on any one mundane human issue, there can be another quotation from the same holy book in opposition. A case in point is the issue of apostasy in Islam. I have read Muslims quoting from the Koran at length to prove that faith in God cannot be coerced, and therefore apostates should not be punished by death or any other penalty imposed by the state.

Then there is the problem with language. In the beginning, there was the Word - with a capital W I think. People tend to think of language as a human invention, a tool for communication. Actually, language is much more than a mere tool made by human beings.

20th century philosophy in the English speaking world and in continental Europe is mostly about language. After noble attempts by some of the finest minds in the world, we still do not know exactly what language is. They cannot even agree on what constitutes meaning, let alone the meaning of meaning. Some insights, however, are useful for our purpose.

For instance, Wittgenstein thought that the meaning of words is derived from our use of the language, and it depends very much on the context in which the words appear. In short, words do not have unchanging fixed eternal meanings. God's Word may be eternal truth, but human words are not. In fact, that is why we need religion.

If Wittgenstein is right, then we do have a problem with people quoting the holy books. Can any word or any passage from the holy books be applied to all infinite number of possible contexts? How do we know when even the holiest of devotees are not quoting the words of God out of context, and thereby twisting the divine message spoken through the mouth of the prophets? Are human beings not fallible by nature? Is it not the case that even the Devil can quote the Bible?

Is eternity outside time?

The context of words and sentences is not just the context in which they appear in a piece of original text. There are also the historical and cultural contexts in which the prophets and the holy men received and propagated the divine message. Can the words and deeds of the most holy of prophets be applied to all infinite number of circumstances running for all time or even eternity?

Why, we do not even know what time is. Is eternity outside time? Or can we understand 'eternity' enough to talk about it?

This kind of question would seem like heresy to some religious sects that would insist on reading the sacred texts in their "original meaning". There are always my friends in PAS, who have been alleged to read literal meanings into their holy books.

Words in any language are symbols, sounds and scratches of lines on paper. It is really quite confusing to talk about the 'literal meaning' of any word, as if the meaning of words is not all symbolic by nature.

Before I am arrested and burned on the stake, let me reiterate that God's Word is eternal. But man's reading of the holy books is always subject to a process of interpretation by the reader. God is perfect, and man is not.

There are learned clerics who have studied the art of hermeneutics all their life, in learning how to read the holy books. Hermeneutics comes from the Greek myth of Hermes, who is supposed to be a messenger between the Olympian gods and mere mortals.

We no longer have living prophets who work miracles and speak the words of God directly to us, so we depend a lot on the clerics and the religious scholars. Organised religions cannot survive without these clerics. They are invaluable to their religious community, leading by their inspired words and deeds, their thorough knowledge of the holy texts, and above all, by their deep living faith.

The exclusive right

Nevertheless, these clerics are also men of flesh, mortal beings who are vulnerable to the vagaries of human nature and the temptation served up by the Devil. Perhaps, it is in the nature of things that when they are closest to God, they are also closest to the Devil.

Therefore, I get very uncomfortable when well-known clerics begin to breathe brimstones and hell-fire, and start to cast living or departed souls into Hell. I have always thought that that sort of punishment is the exclusive right reserved for the Creator alone!

We all have very strong moral feelings. The sentiment of righteous anger is one of the greatest gifts from god to men, and it makes us different from animals. There is always this very noble human faculty called conscience. We know generally that we must do good things, and to refrain from doing bad things, even though the border between good and evil seems like a thin blurred line. (In some cases, the moral landscape before us looks like a no-man's land.)

A good mechanism for self-restraint, I think, lies in our distinguishing between moral righteousness and self-righteousness.

Moral righteousness comes from loving the God as encompassed in the perfect Being, and hating evil in all forms. Self-righteousness is also another manifestation of moral righteousness, but with a difference. The overzealous self-righteous person allows no room for doubt, and assumes that he has in his possession the kind of omniscience that is properly the knowledge that only God has.

Area of uncertainty

The lack of perfect human knowledge is not a cause for despair, turning us into nihilistic cynics, or self-contradictory relativists. It needs not drive us towards blind faith either. Reason and faith are not necessarily opposed to one another. They can be mutually complementary.

In the face of so much mystery in our lives that is so hard to understand, we have to accept that there is a limit to what we can ever know, especially in matters of religion. This area of uncertainty is where we can meet, as God-fearing believers and atheists, and as believers of different faiths.

We should approach this grey area of uncertainty with humility and good will. Whether the other persons in this area share our faith or not is really irrelevant, if we believe that all sentient beings are the creature of our version of God. The important thing is to start talking, not to win argument or to prove that we are right, but to further the horizons of our common understanding of what the divine means to different people.

In this inter-faith dialogue, real communication must begin from a position in which perhaps we should suspend for the moment our conviction that the Truth revealed in our own faith is the only version of Truth. We must even try to leave this entity called "I" at home. That way, we will not simply judge other people, and cast our first stone, as if we are the very personification of God.

Judge not, and thou shalt not be judged, on Judgement Day!