A Proposal by Daesoon Thoughts for Living Together in Multi-cultural Society

ABSTRACT

It was after 2005 that Korean people started focusing on multi-cultural society and multi-culture. Moreover according to an article by UN, although Koreans have unusual ethnic pride, the Korean society at 2050 will be a multi-cultural society, with 13.9% of the whole population married to a foreigner. Right now in April 2011, 2.8% of the population is foreigner living in Korea and that is 1.35 million in numbers. However the foreigners do tend to face discord when they have difficulties following Korea’s culture. What matters more is that there is no properly prepared ways by Korea’s government to prevent or countermeasure these difficulties faced by foreigners. Especially when it comes to a religious matter the discord arises even further. Due to the fact that religion is strictly exclusive in the fields of faith and experience, the discord can then become a social issue. Religion plays a very important part in the composition of society and it embraces ethnic identity. Moreover in a multi-cultural society, religion allows various members of that society to express themselves and accept others. Most of the foreigners living in Korea can not ‘choose’ their religion on their own. Muslim is a good example for this. They create and belong in their own religious community and tries their best to keep the identity and culture of their own. The culture is passed down very enthusiastically even to ‘Ko-slim’, child between Korean and Muslim. In this multi-cultural world, we must balance globalization and ‘Korean-ization’, and to do that we must learn to co-exist with the foreigners. So in this article we will focus on the multi-cultural effect in Korea’s society, and would like to consider the proposal by Dae-soon Thoughts for living together and co-evolving society.