It is the civic duty of people living in Ireland to teach and learn about other faiths, a meeting of Muslims, Jews, and Christians was told at a weekend conference.
The Abrahamic family of religions has not always been a close one. Feuds and tiffs over the millennia have meant that Catholic Ireland has only just rediscovered its long lost Islamic and Jewish cousins.
The process of getting to know each other again was discussed on Saturday when the Ahlul-Bait Islamic centre in Milltown, Dublin, hosted about 150 clergy and lay people from the three traditions.
What the organisers hope will be the first of many public meetings of the Three Faiths Forum began with members of each of the congregations explaining briefly what they felt their religions meant and had to offer.
Sister Carmel Niland, the forum's co-ordinator, said Christians had been yearning for a meeting like this for a long time. Dr John d'Arcy May, a lecturer at the Irish School of Ecumenics in Milltown, Dublin, said: "We who are trying to engage in dialogue realise that Christianity can seem a noisy and violent religion with the very image of a man dying as its centre."
Speaking for the Jewish faith, Mr Martin Simmons said that through their belief in God as creator, all the religions present recognised the important truth that man was not in control of his destiny.
This was of great importance as "the greatest tragedies of the millennia have come when people failed to realise they were not masters of what they surveyed".
Although people of faith might have different points of view, Mr Simmons said, it was vital to have respect for these differences. Where this did not exist, "that's when problems start".
Mr Siraj Zaidi said Ireland was once famous for exporting people but now was famous for importing people, many of whom were Muslim.
He said that to repay and protect the privileges of democracy, "it is the civic duty of all our people who belong to different faiths to teach and learn from each other in order to understand the difference between us".
At one stage in a discussion of the role of women in religion, God manifested Her displeasure by drowning out Mr Simmons with static after he had described the traditional role of the woman as "queen of the home".
Sheikh Yayah, of the South Circular Road mosque, said that up to now, Muslims in Ireland had experienced "no big problems".
Refugees a few years ago had faced some small hostility, but "economic growth in Ireland means that there is no competition for jobs, and things have gone quiet now".
Mr Khalid Ibrahim, a member of the National Committee on Racism and Interculturalism, called for the forum and his group to work together.
Dr May said that although racism was at the cutting edge of what the forum was about, it needed to firmly establish itself properly first. Co-operation, he said would take time, but it would come.