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The National Assembly of The Parliament of Guyana has turned down requests to have Hindu opening-prayer in an upcoming session.<\/p>\nThe National Assembly of The Parliament of Guyana has turned down requests to have Hindu opening-prayer in an upcoming session.<\/p>\n
Assembly Assistant Clerk Deslyn West, in an email to distinguished Hindu statesman Rajan Zed (who requested that he be scheduled to read opening-prayer in an upcoming session of the Assembly, and received the denial) wrote: \u201cwe have a religion-neutral policy, and the Speaker is not in favour of departing from this norm\u201d. West added: \u201cwe have a universal prayer that is read in the Parliament at every Sitting, and this was\/is the norm for decades\u201d. Currently National Assembly Clerk Sherlock Isaacs reads this \u201cuniversal prayer\u201d.<\/p>\n
Zed, who is President of Universal Society of Hinduism, and who wrote to the Assembly Speaker Manzoor Nadir and received the denial; feels that it is a case of unfairness, discrimination, favoritism; and does not speak well of a democratic society.<\/p>\n
Rajan Zed is of the view that this so-called \u201cuniversal prayer\u201d appears to be tilted towards one religion and does not contain the elements of all religions observed in Guyana.<\/p>\n
Zed suggests that it is time for the Guyana National Assembly to move to multi-faith opening prayers. Since the Assembly represents every Guyanese irrespective of religion\/denomination\/non-belief, it would be quite befitting in this increasingly diverse country to do a rotation of prayers representing major religions and indigenous\/folk spirituality and including slots for the thoughts of non-believers.<\/p>\n
As adherents of all religions, including minority religions, and non-believers have made a lot of contributions to Guyana and continue to do so and paid their share of the taxes; they should all get representation in the Assembly prayer. Democratic governments should not be influenced by one religion or the other; Rajan Zed, who has opened both the United States Senate and US House of Representatives in Washington DC with Hindu prayers, emphasizes.<\/p>\n
Zed thinks that the existence of different religions is an evident symbol of God\u2019s generosity and munificence. Guyana National Assembly should quest for a unity that hailed diversity.<\/p>\n
Hinduism, oldest and third largest religion of the world, has about 1.2 billion adherents and moksh (liberation) is its ultimate goal.<\/p>\n
Parliament of Guyana was created in 1966 and is based in Georgetown. Assembly has 65 members and Mark Anthony Phillips is the Prime Minister of the Co-operative Republic of Guyana.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
The National Assembly of The Parliament of Guyana has turned down requests to have Hindu opening-prayer in an upcoming session. Assembly Assistant Clerk Deslyn West, in an email to distinguished Hindu statesman Rajan Zed (who requested that he be scheduled to read opening-prayer in an upcoming session of the Assembly, and received the denial) wrote: \u201cwe have a religion-neutral policy, and the Speaker is not in favour of departing from this norm\u201d. West added: \u201cwe have a universal prayer that is read in the Parliament at every Sitting, and this…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":23,"featured_media":636875,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[47748],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-636874","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.malayalamdailynews.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/636874","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.malayalamdailynews.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.malayalamdailynews.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.malayalamdailynews.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/23"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.malayalamdailynews.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=636874"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.malayalamdailynews.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/636874\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.malayalamdailynews.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/636875"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.malayalamdailynews.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=636874"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.malayalamdailynews.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=636874"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.malayalamdailynews.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=636874"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}