Inter-religious meditation during the Forum 2000 conference

From the October 7th until the October 9th 2007 the capital of the Czech Republic, Prague, was the host of thousands of prominent guests from all around the world who participated in the 11th annual Forum 2000 Conference.

During the meetings that were this year dedicated to a topic: Freedom and Responsibility was many times reminded a current situation in Burma. Vaclav Havel, the ex-president of Czech Republic, asked all the participants to support the people in Burma by signing a petition and Farish Ahmad-Noor, Malaysian political scientist, mentioned that a task of all religious people today is to tell the truth to the ‘worldly power’ as it was done by the monks in Burma recently.
Every year a meeting of representatives of the religions of the world takes place and this year it was participated by many important delegates of all three Abraham traditions religions: Hebraism, Christianity and Islam. One of the topics of a discussion was an inseparability of the religion and politics. Czech catholic priest Tomas Halik reminded that religion is a source of values and it creates an ambience for the life in our society.
The conference was concluded by the inter-religious meditation in the roman-catholic parish of Saint Salvatore. The crowded church witnessed how the representatives of Jewish, Christian and Muslim worlds lit together a candle as a sign of a faith in one common God.

The Forum 2000 was founded in 1996 as a joint initiative of the Czech President Václav Havel, Japanese philanthropist Yohei Sasakawa, and Nobel Peace Prize laureate Elie Wiesel. Since 1997, Forum 2000 has organized annual conferences held in Prague which have attracted important thought leaders, Nobel laureates, politicians, business leaders and many others, whose common denominative is experience with bearing responsibility. Their effort to search for the responses to significant global issues culminated in the adoption of the Second Prague Declaration, which briefly sums up the world’s current state and concludes with the words: „Today it is not enough only to observe and describe what is threatening us. It is not enough to talk about hope. The only way is a pragmatic meeting and a free acceptance of our obligation to have a dialogue with everybody and about everything which we consider to be conditions of our common freedom and responsibility in our interconnected world“.