ABSTRACT
In the increasingly interdependent world in which we now live, the coexistence of different religious, cultural, and ethnic groups poses an existential problem that our ancestors never had to confront. For the first time in history the general outlook of a large number of people in the “Westernised” world is dogmatically secular. Yet, as a result of the rapid expansion of the mass media, Internet and email communication, immigration, cheap travel, tourism, and other factors associated with the process of globalisation, we are faced with the daily spectacle of racial, cultural, and religious multiplicity. This is particularly true in the cosmopolitan cities of Britain, Europe and the USA, where citizens, motivated as much by self-interest as by altruistic motives, have had to learn to tolerate and even welcome diversity. Thus the word “pluralism” has come to be used by social scientists not as a neutral term synonymous with diversity, but as an evaluative or loaded concept similar to multiculturalism.
