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<\/p>\nHe said this while advising faith leaders to be careful with the use of social media to avoid promoting conflicts that could go out of hands.<\/p>\n
He gave the advice during interfaith religious dialogue on promoting religious tolerance and acceptance organised by the United Arab Emirate Embassy in Abuja on Thursday.<\/p>\n
He said that persons of faith and leaders that use social media actively owed a responsibility to the society and to everyone else to ensure that it was not allowed to become an instrument of conflict and war.<\/p>\n
He said, \u201dI want to say in particular about social media that we absolutely need to be careful with our use of social media.<\/p>\n
\u201cIf we do not want to promote the kind of conflicts that can completely go out of hands, we must be sure that we are policing ourselves and regulating ourselves on social media.<\/p>\n
\u201cI don\u2019t think that government regulation is necessarily the way to go, but I believe that we as persons of faith, as leaders and those of us who use social media actively, owe a responsibility to our society and to everyone else to ensure that we don\u2019t allow it to become an instrument of conflict and war.<\/p>\n
\u201cRecently, I was sharing at a gathering about my aunty, an 81-year-old lady who thought I had resigned.<\/p>\n
\u201cSometime before the elections, news went round that I had resigned my appointment as Vice President, the news went round on social media and WhatsApp.<\/p>\n
\u201cMy aunt insisted that I had resigned because the news was on WhatsApp. I had to explain to her that I didn\u2019t resign even if the news was on WhatsApp.<\/p>\n
\u201dIt was Rev. Sister Agatha who mentioned (in one of the panel discussions today) that if we are not careful, most people are not discerning enough to tell fact from fiction.<\/p>\n
\u201cDepending on what it is that you are spreading, if you choose to spread the sort of news that can create real conflict and religious misinformation which is the worst sort, it can create the kind of conflict that can completely get out of hand and jeopardize all of our lives, livelihood and property.<\/p>\n
\u201cIt is important that we keep self-regulating and ensuring that we don\u2019t lend our platforms to those who would promote conflict.<\/p>\n
\u201cHowever, I do feel sometimes that we do not speak enough about these common threads and things that bind us; that all human beings regardless of faith or ethnicity, desire much the same things, to be valued, loved, treated with dignity and fairness, to possess at least the basics of life \u2013 food, shelter and clothing sufficient for self and family.<\/p>\n
\u201cAs we have heard, the Golden Rule is \u201clove thy neighbour as thyself\u201d or \u201cdo unto others as you would have them do to you.\u201d This rule occurs in every major religion and even in some iterations of secular constitutions. This is a common thought.<\/p>\n
\u201dIt is significant that there is a truth which all adherents of different faiths and even those who say they do not believe in God can confidently claim belong specifically to their creed or to their own way of thinking, or collectively as people of faith, or as those who even have no faith.<\/p>\n
\u201cTreating people the way we would like to be treated imposes a moral obligation on us to put ourselves in the other person\u2019s shoes before we act. This is the very definition of empathy.<\/p>\n
\u201dFor those of us who are Christians, an understanding of the gospel of Jesus Christ for example, reveals that Christianity is not in fact, a religion. It is the establishment of a relationship of love, forgiveness and reconciliation between God and man.<\/p>\n
\u201cCentral to that message is that we are required to love God and then love our neighbours as ourselves, but the gospel goes on to say that it is a liar who says he loves God but hates his neighbour. So, the whole essence of the love of God itself is demonstrated in the love of one\u2019s neighbour.<\/p>\n
\u201cLove is a sacrificial act, it requires self-sacrifice, which is why what Imam Abubakar Abdullahi did is deeply exemplary. When \u201ca band of herdsmen\u201d as they were described, came into his village to kill Christians, he put them in his home and in the mosque.<\/p>\n
\u201cWhen the \u2018herdsmen\u2019 insisted on killing the Christians, he said they had to kill him first if they wanted to kill the Christians. He put his life on the line for what he believed.<\/p>\n
\u201cOur religious leaders must accept that this is the true demonstration of leadership. We must go beyond rhetoric, beyond talking about tolerance, we must make the sacrifices required. This is the real challenge of leadership, leading rather than following.<\/p>\n
\u201cPreaching hate and suspicion attracts more attention, and more popularity. So, you don\u2019t need great leadership for that. You need great leadership to tell people to love those who hate them and pray for those who curse them, to respond to hate with love, and to show compassion and understanding to people of other faiths.<\/p>\n
\u201cThat is what we need great leadership for and what we need our religious leaders to do. The easiest thing to do in the world is to bring suspicion.<\/p>\n
\u201cThere is already enough suspicion, the fact that you belong to different beliefs, already creates the basis for suspicion. If we make it easy for those fault lines to be perpetrated, then we can\u2019t describe ourselves as true leaders.<\/p>\n
\u201cRecently, I had the privilege of addressing young Muslims and Christians in an event quite similar to this event.<\/p>\n
\u201cI submitted to them that the great conflict of our time is not a clash of civilisations, between Islam and Christianity but between extremism and human solidarity; between the forces of hate and intolerance and those of empathy and peace.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe have heard every side talk about the essence of faith, the essence of faith is peace, compassion and love. But the conflicts that we have are between those who belong to several religions who preach conflict, hate and intolerance.<\/p>\n
\u201dAs practitioners of empathy, it is our responsibility to build bridges and to seek common ground as a basis for national progress.<\/p>\n
\u201dIn every diverse society, a measure of conflict and discord is inevitable. This is the natural social consequence of our differences brushing up against each other. Whether these tensions become teachable moments for learning more about ourselves or they snowball into implacable hostilities, depends on how we address these tensions.<\/p>\n
\u201cAs gatekeepers of the public mind, the media, and now especially social media, play a very crucial role in shaping our perception of these differences.<\/p>\n
\u201dDo we report tragedies and incidents of conflict in ways that promote the sanctity of human life? Or are we simply driven by the need to drive lucrative sales and clicks by promoting shock value, sensations, gratuitous violence and the cynical coverage of carnage?<\/p>\n
\u201cAre we using our platforms to amplify measured voices of reason or are we using them to amplify the voices of divisive hate-mongers? What are we using our platforms for?<\/p>\n
\u201dOne key lesson in terms of media reportage of conflicts is that we must avoid the temptation to demonize whole groups by judging them by their most extreme fringes.<\/p>\n
\u201dWe must resist the urge to portray communities in caricatures. I think it is important to stress that when an individual commits a crime, he or she does so as an individual and not as a representative of an ethnic or religious community.<\/p>\n
\u201dNeither journalistic best practice nor legal convention subscribe to the idea of holding communities responsible for the actions of individuals.<\/p>\n
\u201cThis cycles back to the Golden Rule. Are we portraying the subjects of our reportage as demons? Are we portraying people in the way we want to be portrayed?\u201d he said<\/p>\n
He added, \u201cYou have a responsibility to help us see the bigger picture, to rise above our prejudices and to apprehend the nuances that characterize inter-group relations in a plural society such as ours.\u201d<\/p>\n
He said that the conversations witnessed at the gathering had shown, that \u201cwe have voices of reason and empathy in our religious communities. I urge the media and social media which involves every one of us as gatekeepers of the public mind, to lend their platforms to advocates of peace and mutual understanding and therefore amplify our potential for harmonious co-existence.<\/p>\n
\u201cAt the same time, we must ensure that we intentionally marginalize the agents of intolerance and hatred and deny them the ability to influence impressionable hearts and minds.<\/p>\n
\u201cAs religious leaders, media personalities and people of faith in general, we share a common calling to apprehend the truth. One truth that our diverse moral traditions agree on is the Golden Rule. It is, in many respects, the primary ethic and as we commit to practically living it out, we will bring in a kinder, safer and more peaceful world into being.\u201d<\/p><\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Vice President Yemi Osinbajo has revealed that his 81-year-old aunty once insisted that he (Osinbajo) had resigned his post as the Vice President because of lies on social media. He said this while advising faith leaders to be careful with the use of social media to avoid promoting conflicts that could go out of hands. […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":131973,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[3,4],"tags":[2658,1187],"class_list":["post-162897","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-news","category-politics","tag-a","tag-yemi-osinbajo"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/arewa.ng\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/162897","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/arewa.ng\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/arewa.ng\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/arewa.ng\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/arewa.ng\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=162897"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/arewa.ng\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/162897\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/arewa.ng\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/131973"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/arewa.ng\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=162897"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/arewa.ng\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=162897"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/arewa.ng\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=162897"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}