Religious humility.

That was my two-word takeaway from a Jewish-Christian-Muslim dialogue held a few days ago at the University of Toledo and sponsored by the UT Center for Religious Understanding.

The Rev. James Bacik, theologian and retired pastor of Corpus Christi University parish, led off, with responses by Dr. S. Amjad Hussain, a retired UT professor of medicine (and Blade columnist), and Rabbi Evan Rubin.

Father Bacik focused on compassion. But ringing in my ears was something I heard Judge James Carr say a few weeks back in another context: Let’s start with tolerance.

We have a long way to go. The tendency is to see Muslims as the other, and Islam, not as a great and civilizing world religion but as an inherently intolerant, indeed violent, fanaticism.

A few months ago I met Fatima Al-Hayani, a retired professor of Islamic studies who has devoted her life in recent years to teaching Ohioans and Michiganders about Islam. She told me she has read the Qu’ran back to back several times. She said tolerance is intrinsic to the text. But it is misused and misunderstood, as the Bible is.

I think of the Bible as a plea for justice and love. But it has fueled much confused intolerance through the centuries.

President Obama gave what I think was a brave speech to the National Prayer Breakfast on Feb. 5th. He said:

“We see ISIL, a brutal, vicious death cult that, in the name of religion, carries out unspeakable acts of barbarism. … [But] lest we get on our high horse ... remember that during the Crusades and Inquisition, people committed terrible deeds in the name of Christ. In our home country, slavery and Jim Crow all too often was justified in the name of Christ ...

“So this is not unique to one group or one religion … [but] a sinful tendency, that can pervert and distort our faith. ...

“We should therefore start with some basic humility. Our job is not to ask that God respond to our notion of truth ...,” the President said

.There is something in the human being that tends to ideologize faith — even secular faith, like faith in democracy. And then we make an idol of that belief system. That is when we begin to cut corners morally — to convince ourselves that we are doing wrong things for a noble reason. Right is on our side.

In Nazism and ISIL, there is not so much a perversion of a Truth, but wrapping a Big Lie in the mantle of a belief system, so as to exploit the desperate and gullible.

The President’s remarks set off a firestorm. We are not supposed to question OUR truths of Christianity and American democracy. And many are befuddled by the notion that you can believe and yet be humbled by belief.

But the only way that we renew our beliefs; or, failing that, at least try to keep them honest; or, failing that, practice tolerance, is with self-examination.

Abraham Lincoln said this, long before Mr. Obama.

Keith C. Burris is a columnist for The Blade.

Contact him at: kburris@theblade.com or 419-724-6266.

First Published February 17, 2015, 5:00 a.m.