The Interfaith Youth Forum is a discussion based event that encourages high school students from different faiths to come together and talk about major issues in the world and similarities between cultures. We go to different locations of worship from different religions so that we can get the experience of witnessing different types of services and prayers. This year we had gone to a Buddhist Temple in Yorba Linda, California.
There we were able to see a Buddhist prayer service which included a description and small tour of the altar that was set up inside the main prayer hall. We were informed of the symbolic nature of most of the altar pieces and the meaning of the prayers that they had recited.
Next came the discussion part of the forum. We were split into table which included one person from each faith. After an ice breaker we started answering questions that were given to us. Usually the questions centered around a current issue. With the recent BP oil spill, the questions were all related to the environment and its connection to our religion and life. The responses were fairly similar with a few extremes on both sides.
Through the discussion, we were able to remove some of the stereotypes we had about certain religions and found that there were many similarities between all the religious groups that participated.
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