Page 104 - FSB 2020 God's Church for God's World

94 God’s Church for God’s World
Kofi Annan – Nobel Lecture 2001
Video link https://youtu.be/PWKrOVSat_s?t=128
Today’s real borders are not between nations, but between powerful and powerless, free and fettered, privileged and humiliated. Today, no walls can separate humanitarian or human rights crises in one part of the world from national security crises in another.
Scientists tell us that the world of nature is so small and interdependent that a butterfly flapping its wings in the Amazon rainforest can generate a violent storm on the other side of the earth. This principle is known as the Butterfly Effect. Today, we realize, perhaps more than ever, that the world of human activity also has its own Butterfly Effect – for better or for worse.
We have entered the third millennium through a gate of fire. If today, after the horror of 11 September, we see better, and we see further
– we will realize that humanity is indivisible. New threats make no distinction between races, nations or regions. A new insecurity has entered every mind, regardless of wealth or status. A deeper awareness of the bonds that bind us all – in pain as in prosperity – has gripped young and old.
Each of us has the right to take pride in our particular faith or heritage. But the notion that what is ours is necessarily in conflict with what is theirs is both false and dangerous. It has resulted in endless enmity and conflict, leading men to commit the greatest of crimes in the name of a higher power.
It need not be so. People of different religions and cultures live side by side in almost every part of the world, and most of us have overlapping identities which unite us with very different groups. We can love what we are, without hating what – and who – we are not. We can thrive in our own tradition, even as we learn from others, and come to respect their teachings.
This will not be possible, however, without freedom of religion, of expression, of assembly, and basic equality under the law. Indeed,
the lesson of the past century has been that where the dignity of the individual has been trampled or threatened – where citizens have
not enjoyed the basic right to choose their government, or the right
to change it regularly – conflict has too often followed, with innocent civilians paying the price, in lives cut short and communities destroyed.
10 December 2001 Nobel Lecture delivered by Kofi Annan, United Nations Secretary General