Well in the case of Jesus, he wrote something in the ground just before saying "let the one without sin cast the first stone." I dunno if it was the portion of the law saying that BOTH the man and the woman were to be stoned, not just the woman. Where was the guilty man?
If you are suggesting that had they both been there Jesus would have commenced to stoning them both, himself, I think that might have conflicted with his apparent mission of absolving humanity of all sin. And stoning someone seems fairly out of character for Jesus. I think it's fairly apparent that the point was that humanity was neither the arbiter of morality nor the agent of justice, and not that she should be let go on a technicality. Surely, the rest of the New Testament reinforces this.
I think the entire part about the absence of the man was merely to demonstrate the hypocrisy of the pharisees, who were not interested in meting out justice but in laying a trap for Jesus, which clearly demonstrates why humanity cannot be trusted to be its own judge--it was using the law to suit its own ends rather than God's. And I don't think the implication was that humanity should try harder to serve God in administering justice but that humanity was, on the whole, fundamentally incapable of doing so. If Jesus had been interested merely in the double-standard, he wouldn't have immediately followed with "let him who is without sin cast the first stone" but something along the lines of "so where's this guy?"
Of course, I could be wrong.
Hey, I get along with Buddhists just fine.
I'm not suggesting you don't. I was talking specifically about a "harmony" that exceeds civility. I mean, as far as I know, Buddhists and Christians aren't particularly antagonistic toward one another.
Is it a matter of the faiths being reconciled, or a matter of the people being reconciled?
I think the notion that the people of various faiths have always been at each other's throats for all of history is a myth. Consider that the Ottoman empire provided a fairly enlightened rule for a number of centuries in which Christians, Muslims, and Jews were allowed to live and worship mostly as they saw fit and without major internal struggles for control of the holy land. I think, for instance, modern struggles between Israel and Palestine are a direct result of the fragmentation of the Ottoman Empire into various proxies, through which major powers antagonize one another to this day. That these modern struggles often express themselves in religious language does not mean that they are primarily religious struggles. It's been more than four hundred years since Machiavelli wrote his infamous little book and more than a century since Nietzsche famously announced that God was dead, which didn't refer to the deity Himself, but rather His function in society. Ours isn't a world populated by Jews, Christians, and Muslims, but by lawyers, laborers, and revolutionaries who mostly adopt religious affiliations to conform to nationalistic narratives.
I'm not suggesting that sincere belief is impossible, but that today it is largely either secondary or entirely false. If Islam were restricted geographically to the interior of Africa rather than the most oil-rich region of the world, I feel there would be no great "clash of civilizations." In that case, I don't even think most western persons would even know about the religion.
If your main purpose is the glorious unification of all peoples into one harmonious whole, I think that sounds like a job to which humanity is particularly unsuited. It might require God. Practical utopias have, historically, not ended well.
Of course, I could be wrong.
