I’m very diffident towards values, any kind of. Because you know, values can be very dangerous. And as the poem of Yeats says, the passionate intensity in believing in something can be very dangerous.
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We’re looking at religion as an organized and above all institutionalized system of beliefs. The organization particularly of textual or other recorded teachings that form the basic faith framework of the religion, and the institutionalization which polices those teachings, polices the extent, the limits, and above all the interpretation of what those texts might mean.
One of the problems here, of course, is that there’s no “we.” Who’s we? I mean, humanity’s composed—the human species is composed—of billions of separate individuals with different goals, different plans, different values, and different ideals.
What’s the best way to get over xenophobia? Eradicate the “xeno” portion of it, and then the “phobia” part will evaporate. You have to learn about the other. You have to make them not the other anymore. It’s education. We have to be exposed to each other. And not so that we could all be paper copies of one another, but so that we learn to appreciate the diversity in the world.