How many times have you heard, and maybe even said, “All religions are different paths up the same mountain. We’re all serving the same God, but simply getting to Him by different roads”? It sounds so reasonable, and so it ought to be true.
I read an essay by Stephen Prothero – a professor of religion at Boston University (The
Christian Science Monitor.
5/17/10) that he called: Stop
thinking that all religions are
essentially the same.
His article stopped me in my tracks. Prothero says, This is a
lovely sentiment but it is dangerous,
disrespectful, and untrue….
One purpose of the “all religions
are one” mantra is to stop this
fighting and this killing. And
it is comforting to pretend that
the great religions make up one
happy family. But this sentiment,
however well intentioned,
is neither accurate nor ethically
responsible.
We are very uncomfortable with individuals and religions that exclude everyone else from God and paradise except themselves. And most of us have ambivalent feelings about those who come to the door and ask, “Are you saved?” with the definite implication that we aren’t, but they are.
Little wonder then that many of us find comfort in William Blake, the English poet of the early 1800s, who taught “All Religions Are One” and so ushered in the age of religious tolerance.
But Mr. Prothero isn’t buying any of this. He says, But
the idea of religious unity is wishful
thinking and it has not made
the world a safer place.
He goes on to say, The world’s religious
rivals do converge when it comes
to ethics, but they diverge sharply
on doctrine, ritual, mythology,
experience and law.
Far from climbing the mountain from different directions the major religions do not teach the same truths, have the same rituals, nor do they share the same goals. He goes on: For example, in Christianity the
problem is sin, the goal is salvation,
the technique for achieving
salvation is some combination
of faith and good works, and the
exemplars who chart this path
are the saints in Catholicism and
Orthodoxy and ordinary people
of faith in Protestantism.
And in Buddhism the problem
is suffering, the goal is nirvana,
the technique for achieving
nirvana is the Noble Eightfold
Path.
Is there any hope then? Prothero asserts some hope. What we need on this furiously
religious planet is a realistic view
of where religious rivals clash
and where they can cooperate.
Approaching this volatile
topic from this new angle may be
scary. But the world is what it is.
And both tolerance and respect
are empty virtues until we actually
know something about
whomever it is we are supposed
to be tolerating and respecting.
Unfortunately, we live in a
world where religion seems as
likely to detonate a bomb as to
defuse one. So while we need
idealism, we need realism even
more.
As I said earlier, this essay stopped me in my tracks.
Each month a member of the
Cook County Ministerium will
offer Spiritual Reflections. For
September, our contributor
is Father Seamus Walsh of St.
John’s Catholic Church in Grand
Marais.
Leave a Reply