Many Religions: All Wrong, All Right (A guest response)

Well readers, things get better and better. We had an intriguing post last week by a colleague of mine and now we have a brilliant response. I should say this: they are not debating, they are discussing. They are two brilliant people commenting thoughtfully on a topic so that you, the reader, can have some food for thought in thinking about an important question. This is the way the world should work, it's downright civil.

No, religions are not all the same. And they are.

The previous post has done a quite brilliant job already pointing out the shared values across religions, and their near-universal claims to speak the sole truth. I agree with Pete that to stop at the former is banal; if the only function of religion is a system of dogmas built around the basic tenets of “be nice,” then there are a lot more direct ways to get there, and we can lay aside any religion, let alone a specific one. And if we take seriously (as many do) religions’ claims to sole ownership of factually accurate cosmology, then we still have a problem: how do we choose among these claims?

However, neither of these commonalities serves to explain the complex endeavor of human religion across time and space. Religion’s purpose is not to codify social rules and enforcement mechanisms; culture can do that. Rather, the purpose of religion in human life is to find ways to speak about truths that are beyond the grasp of human language or imagining. The variety of human religions is not because many of them get it wrong, but because ALL of them do. That is the nature of humanity: we get wrong the divine. We try to name the ineffable and describe the unseen, to point to the complex web of connections between our time- and space-limited selves and the sense we have that something runs through us that is eternal. That sense is hope and terror; it is faith and doubt. It is the reason we – all of humanity from the time society began – create systems of mythos and ritual. And because this is serious and important, we sometimes make the mistake of claiming that that the system of symbols and images and rituals and heroes we grew up with, the one we have worked so hard to know and connect to, must be the only one that is true.

A first-century, olive-skinned, Galilean preacher is Pete’s lord and savior and mine, and he could be yours too. But so could the Brahman. Or Xochicoatl. If you find a set of language and practices that draw you closer to the divine, helping you to be better to yourself and others than you would otherwise be, that is salvation.

Do not mistake me: I am not arguing that every religion is the same or even equally valid. A set of practices and symbols need not be Christianity or even a recognized religion to be redemptive, but it must be hard. In my experience, it must be practiced both in individual self-search and in community. There are all too many who would try to buy fulfillment at the lowest bid, whether at church or the yoga studio or Starbucks. These are the thieves and robbers who would climb in by another way, by the self-serving religions of judgment that applies only to others and of self-sacrifice that extends only as far as the cardio equipment at the gym.

However, those who engage in self-examination and seek to do less evil and more good than the world would otherwise dispose them to: these come to salvation by the only door there is. We call that door Christ, the living Word of God. You might call it by another name, just as wrong, and just as good.