Exploring Religious Pluralism in the Classroom: How to use religious education in schools to combat extremism

My proposal is that the religious education curriculum should consider and discuss the play Nathan the Wise, written by the eighteenth century German playwright and man of letters, Gotthold Ephraim Lessing, and especially that section of it given over to a presentation of the so-called ‘fable of the three rings’. [...] Lessing’s parable of the three rings was intended to represent the three faiths in a way that enables their adherents to continue to accept all the tenets of their own faith, without compromising its own form of particularism, while fully recognising the equal reasonableness of adherents of the other two faiths doing precisely the same in connection with theirs. [...] And when he understood the condition of mankind, and that the greatest part of them were like brute beasts, he knew that all wisdom, direction and good success consisted in what the messengers of God had spoken, and the Law delivered; and that there was no other way Civitas: Institute for the Study of Civil Society Exploring Religious Pluralism in the Classroom • 9 5. [...] Given, however, his known deep and abiding admiration for the rationalist metaphysics of Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz who considered the diversity exhibited by nature to be a necessary consequence of the world being the creation of an omnipotent, omniscient and wholly good God, it is safe to suppose that Mendelssohn considered religious diversity a part of the plan and purpose of providence for reaso. [...] 15 Leibniz wrote: ‘It follows from the supreme perfection of God that in producing the universe He chose the best possible plan, containing the greatest variety together with the greatest order… For all possible things have a claim to existence in the understanding of God in proportion to their perfections, the result of all these claims must be the most perfect actual world which is possible.’ Le.