I wish *I* had 6 arms. OR blue skin. Blue skin probably wouldn’t burn as easily as Irish skin.

Michael:

The idea you’re criticizing is a bastardized version of one that’s been around a long time: “esoterism.” Check this book out.

Best,
Mike

For me, the wild eyed ascetic and the beatific buddha are, perhaps, two sides of the same coin. The yin and yang, if you will, of the spiritual. In terms of icons, there are plenty of Hindu images of wild gods, and I recall that many of the paintings of the saints are no less clam and inward looking, even down to the small, serene smile.

One of the principles of Unitarianism is “a free and responsible search for truth and meaning.” I have always taken this principle to mean that there are many paths to what might be called enlightenment, or truth, or maybe even God. For some people, that search takes them to the high rites of the Catholic church. For others, to the inward introspection of the eight-fold path of Buddhism. I can’t say that either one is wrong. As it fulfills the inscrutable exhortations of one’s soul, it is sufficient.

What the hell, I’ll bite.

I think a key element of the “all religions are the same” argument is the claim that all religions are wrong. Far from a downplayed implication, that should be the central theme. The idea is that all humanity has experienced some variety of imperfect revelation - that any religious thinker or prophet is touched by the divine but fundamentally blinded by the mundane. It can be taken as either an optimistic or pessimistic viewpoint - either any religion is an equally valid guide to the divine or any religion is an equally futile quest for the divine - depending on the individual.

Far from being a liberal platitude, I think it’s one natural response to a world where religions are increasingly exposed to one another. Just as syncretic religions grew up in the Americas when slaves and natives merged their own gods into the quasi-pantheon of Catholic saints, today people in need of spiritual guidance are beginning to explore the idea of a universal syncretism. They find themselves wondering why they should believe a given religion is right and all others wrong simply because it’s the one they happened to be raised in - which is, of course, an excellent question. These people often find solace in the idea that their religion is, like any other, an imperfect one, tainted by centuries of human interference, with no real claim to absolute truth. I for one don’t see any good arguments to refute them with.

Following up on Mr. Marks’ comments regarding people beginning to question the religion they were brought up in, I would like to say that I have met many a person who left a religion without really ever knowing what it was. I’ll leave others to debate the question of whether those folks were ever really part of the religion to begin with, but what I want to specifically comment on is that I find it a bit melancholy that a person would be more disposed to reject the religion prior to learning about it more fully. I’ve spoken to many lapsed Catholics who have told me that they feel that Catholicism is just another face of the Divine, and one just as valid or invalid as any other religion. Yet, if you ask them what they know about Catholicism they frequently don’t know very much. Moreover, if you ask they about the other religions they were inwardly comparing to Catholicism in order to make that “all religions are basically the same” statement they frequently know little about them as well. With such sparse knowledge to pull from it is no wonder that all religions look the same to them. I suspect that the more one learns about religions, especially what they aspire to and what they value outside of the ethical sphere, the less viable is the argument.

I honestly don’t see how that’s relevant to the question of “should someone believe something because it’s what their parents believed?” I mean, I can very easily imagine you saying exactly what you just said but replacing “Catholicism” with “Islam” or “ancestor worship” if we happened to be having this conversation in Algeria or Papua New Guinea.

I find that practicing Catholics frequently know very little about Catholicism. (I can’t tell you how many times I’ve had to explain the Immaculate Conception, for example.) I don’t see any correlation between extent of faith and extent of knowledge. If anything, I’d say learning more about Catholicism is exactly what lapsed a lot of the former Catholics I went to school with, myself probably included. You can put that down to a lot of things, like the fact that the religion department in my school was largely a place to dump unfireable teachers from other fields once they had gone senile or insane, but the fact remains that learning more about Catholicism has never, in my experience, unapostasied anybody.

Mr. Marks,

I don’t agree with you regarding your hypothesis that learning about Catholicism leads to many people rejecting it. I am also okay disagreeing with you about that since that is not the central concern of this post. Others can debate that with you, but I wager it would be a waste of time and I wouldn’t endorse it.

The central concern, as I see it, is an attempt to better understand whether religions are more or less the same. Michael wrote that there are some similarities between world religions, and it would be strange if none existed, but that these are largely matters of general behavior (ethics and ascetics) and not about how those religions perceive the cosmos and one’s place in it. The latter is more important and essential to a philosophy and/or religion, and thereby impeaches the claim that all religions are the same. A Buddhist and a Catholic monk may each withdraw from the world and may seem to support the claim in question, but if we ask them about the Fall, eschatology, sin, suffering, prayer, or what not, we are likely to receive answers that do not square with the claim after all.

My argument is that many people who argue contrary and indeed stress a fundamental similarity between religions often do so out of a lack of knowledge about what those religions actually proclaim. If one simply observes the Catholic and Buddhist monks, which is easy and apparent, the claim still stands. If one studies Catholicism and Buddhism, which is time consuming and perhaps difficult, then the claim is less supportable. Many people do not take that second step.

* I was careful to use a word like “many” instead of “all”. I recognize that there may be counter examples which preclude a categorical statement on the matter. Please, let’s try to remain in the center of a normal distribution rather than focusing on the tails.

Mr. Marks, I certainly agree with and applaud your focus on the implicit claim that “all religions are wrong” is inherent to “all religions are the same”.

What is going to immediately set any religious person on the defensive, however, is this:

“They find themselves wondering why they should believe a given religion is right and all others wrong simply because it’s the one they happened to be raised in - which is, of course, an excellent question. These people often find solace in the idea that their religion is, like any other, an imperfect one, tainted by centuries of human interference, with no real claim to absolute truth. I for one don’t see any good arguments to refute them with.”

You argument presupposes that the only reason that any religion might be right and others wrong is that it is the religion a person was raised in. Of course you don’t see any good arguments to refute this with—you’ve already hand-selected the only argument you’re willing to consider.

Now, it is possible that the only right conclusion of examining the multifarious beliefs of human-kind is that all religions are wrong, but we’d have to argue that from the specifics of those individual claims. You wouldn’t, after all, say that western science and tribal superstition have equally wrong/right explanations of how weather works, would you? No—you’d argue that the specific claims of Western science testify to its superiority.

I don’t mind at all the claim that a specific study of religion will demonstrate that there’s no legitimate claim to the exclusive correctness of any particular religion. But it troubles me to see so many people in the more thoughtful sphere dismiss the possibility of religious truth because of the mere existence of multiple accounts.

I don’t think this is, ultimately, what you’re doing. (I’m confident that you do, in fact, have arguments as to why the particular truth-claims of some of the different religions are not credible.) But I do think you’ve become comfortable using language that makes you vulnerable to trappings of this fallacy.

G, from my perspective, this is little more than an elucidation of the point I think you’re making. Correct me if I’m wrong.

Nate,

I liked what you wrote and agree. But I still think that it is a less interesting digression from the main question at hand. I’m excited to talk about the question even though I disagree with it so much because if we can recognize that all religions are not fundamentally the same, but that the ethical and behavior similarities do exist, then we might be able to speculate as to the etiology of those similarities despite fundamental differences in the many systems. This seems worth while.

P.S.
I was anonymous above.

Nate, do you really want to get into whether science or tribal beliefs have a better explanation for weather patterns? Doesn’t that pit religion against science to the detriment of both? The question is whether the Christians or the Buddhists have a better explanation for weather patterns, which is something quite different. More to the point, most religions don’t deal with weather patterns, but do deal with more incorporeal stuff, the soul, morality, and so on. There are arguments about whether Catholic Church or the Buddhists have a better idea of the soul, but I don’t think that the third argument, “both have a grain of truth” or “both are equally wrong” should be so blithely dismissed.

Let me be clear: I’m not saying the religious people have all chosen their religion for the sole reason that it’s the one they were brought up in. Obviously that’s not the only reason people choose a religion, otherwise there wouldn’t be converts. But to deny that millions of people worldwide are religious in the way they are because of their family and their culture is absurd. For a very, very long time I tried to hold on to beliefs that I simply can’t agree with because I felt that to give them up would make me stop being a Christian, and I simply couldn’t fathom the concept of not being a Christian. A Christian is what you are, if you’re me - renouncing that would be like deciding I was black. Even today I often call myself a Christian, albeit a Christian with disclaimers, largely because I feel a strong societal pressure to do so. (And largely because the message of the Gospels genuinely resonates with me.)

But for me, and for a lot of other people, eventually the question comes up: why am I a Christian? Because I was baptized as one in a ceremony I can’t remember? Because I went to Episcopalian and Catholic schools for more than half my pre-tertiary education career? Because I’m an Anglo-Hiberno-Welshman whose family has been either Catholic or Anglican since the expulsion of the snakes? (I’m not saying they were always that observant. My mother was when I was in middle school, largely because I was, but for most of my life religion has not been that important to her. My father has always been proud of his Catholicism but has barely set foot inside a church since his days of being beaten by nuns.) If the only thing convincing you that Christianity is correct is the fact that you happened to be born a Christian, that’s not much of an argument. It’s like saying French is the one true language because you were born in France. That’s all I’m saying.

Martin M., I share your basic sympathy with the situation of people who get into contemporary syncretism and related movements. I have a pretty pessimistic stance toward these movements, however.

First, they fail to confront the philosophical claims of various faiths that would pretty much guarantee their mutual incompatibility. I’d say this is a weakness, not a strength. Backing up Martin G. here, it’s a very deep problem—an intellectual one, not just a cultural one—that we don’t take seriously enough the philosophical claims of religion(s).

Second, on a cultural level they open the door for—or perhaps inherently constitute—a less meaningful “path,” because the approach of “take what you need and leave the rest” also applies to entire traditions, not just their doctrines. Selective engagement with faiths and cultures is not faith and culture; it is an inversion of them. (I’d qualify this a bunch of ways, but it’s a good basic statement.) Religion more easily serves shallower psychological purposes when its practice does not entail submission to a set of truths and an institution that embodies them.

We no longer have anything resembling a shared culture, and massively powerful forces do all they can to discredit genuinely religious rationales and energies; hence an increasing need for phenomena like New Age syncretisms, which are basically post-religious faiths. I’ll also go ahead and be the millionth guy to point out that the basic set of reigning “liberal platitudes” obviously functions for many, many believing brethren as another sort of post-religious faith. That crucial moment when we finally achieve equality of opportunity will have to be more than a little, y’know, rapturous.