Your excellencies, ladies and gentlemen.
On behalf of the British Sri Lankan Association we are grateful to you all for your presence here this evening.
We express our gratitude to all our eminent speakers and all our special guests who are here at our inaugural event.
We would like to thank Muslim Aid for partnering this event titled ‘ The Night for Children’ .
The British Sri Lankan Association (BriSLA) is a coordinating organization whose remit is to promote unity and harmony between all the communities in the UK and Sri Lanka.
We want to assist in the balancing of inequalities and have a positive impact on the environment in both Sri Lanka and the UK. We wish to foster harmony and draw bridges between these two islands
As an association we are hoping to speak in a single, credible unified voice.
There is more than one strand to society. There are many common threads in the following of all religions.
All teach ethics that includes love, kindness, patience, generosity and social responsibility, and all accept the existence of some form of absolute.
They use different languages, different names and different symbols to describe and explain these spiritual concepts;
And it is only by leaving behind the narrow minded promotion of religious intolerances and self righteousness, that society can truly progress.
We need to cultivate in ourselves positive thinking with the common purpose of aiming good for all. It is a mission we as an association are striving for although we appreciate how difficult this is as a task.
The presence of other faiths does not come at the expense of your own. That, in fact, accepting and coexisting with another faith does not make you less of a Muslim, a Christian, a Jew, a Hindu, a Seikh, a Buddhist- it makes you more of one.
Thank you for your attention, and I sincerely hope you have a wonderful evening.
