Is it called INTOLERANCE or AMBITION?

The news about burning church in Cambodia is a rare act of religious intolerance or invasive ambition? It happened in an outskirt village of Phnom Penh capital city in May 2, 2006. According to the news, there were approximately 300 Buddhist villagers bursted into anger and burned a Christian church in their village. As I know this is not the first time happened in Cambodia. In order to understand this matter clearly and seek out the effective way for long term solution; I would like to inspire all readers and news reporters pay attention to the two objectives ie is this Buddhist religious intolerance or invasive ambition of world Christian organization?

Generally, Buddhism is recognized as one of the most tolerant religions in this planet. There are many researchers, scholars or resources have written about this. Problems happened in Cambodia can be considered by some slight aspects of those perpetrators. Firstly, the Buddhist villagers might have personal hate towards those minor group. Secondly, the Buddhist villagers might have less understanding in their own basical, principle teachings which focus on compassion, tolerance, wisdom and non-violence. Thirdly, the minor Cambodian Christians might have much exaggerating verbal about their new conversion. Of course, both sides have had the same fundamental delusion such as those Buddhists have less knowledge in their principle doctrince and those minor Christians have had easy-going to become Christian which is monitored by world Christian missionary.

On the other hand, we cannot say the word "rare act of religious intolerance of Buddhist group..." only because the Christian missionary organizations always have ambition to dominate the world and they have tried to convert people in everywhere with the varieties of strategy. Furthermore, there are many misconducts of Christian organizations in Cambodia like building churches without authority permission, erecting numberious of churches without having a proper members or consent from neighborhood and bribing the local authorities in order to achieve their goals.

I think this slight matter can be an example for the world's religious intolerance issue. Today, only 300 of Cambodian people who claimed themselves Buddhists have burned nearby Christian church, in the future this conflict can happen again in a larger circumstance. Of course, as we can observe, there are many religious intolerance from multitheistic and monotheistic religions. We can research more about this in the words of crusade, inquisition, religious persecution, religious war, jihad or the dark age etc.

One thing that impresses me very much is the consistent, converting ambition of world Christian organizations. They are targeting to those developing countries such Asia and Africa. We can notice that the tactics in converting other faith into Christian congregation is very different between before Second Vatican Council and after Second Vatican Council. However, this new dialogue Catholic Christian strategy is still making intolerance among the world's population.

In order to end this dispute, Christian missionary organizations would think about using peaceful and genuine compassionate mission to dignitize human beings rather than helping but converting them. In the developed countries like USA or Canada; they have no had conversion activities like in Cambodia at all.

So the religious intolerance can be assumed and condemned by not to those mobs but also to those ambitious, consistent dominant organizations.

By Preah Bhikkhu Vodano

Read more details in:
- http://www.news24.com/News24/World/News/0,,2-10-1462_1925549,00.html
- http://www.chinapost.com.tw/i_latestdetail.asp?id=37942
- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Religious_intolerance