There are two main kinds of religious pluralism. One is good and one is intellectually bankrupt.
Good pluralism: Numerous distinct ethnic, religious, or cultural groups are present and tolerated within a society.
Bad pluralism: All religions are true and equally valid paths to God.
Pluralism can be a good thing if it means we should tolerate the beliefs of others. Jesus, who was God in flesh, didn’t force anyone to convert. So why should we think that we can?
Christianity should flourish in a society with good pluralism, as the Gospel can be shared freely and there isn’t pressure to fake one’s beliefs. Sadly, we often get complacent in such atmospheres and Christianity spreads just as well or better in times of persecution. It tends to weed out false believers and teachers more effectively.
Of course, there are some truths in each religion, but there are irreconcilable differences in their essential truth claims regarding the nature of God, the path to salvation, their view of Jesus, etc.
Here are some examples:
One of the following is possible when we die, but under no circumstance could more than one be possible:
- Reincarnation (Hinduism, New Age)
- Complete nothingness (Atheism)
- One death then judgment by God (Christianity, Islam, others)
Jesus was either the Messiah (Christianity) or He was not the Messiah (Judaism and others), but He cannot be both the Messiah and not the Messiah.
God either doesn’t exist (Atheism), He exists and is personal (Christianity) or He exists and is impersonal (Hinduism).
Jesus either died on the cross (Christianity) or He didn’t (Islam).
God either revealed himself to us (many religions) or he didn’t (Atheism, Agnosticism).
Jesus is the eternally existent God (Christianity) or He isn’t (everything else, including the Mormon and Jehovah’s Witness). In fact, in Islam it is an unforgivable sin to claim that Jesus is God, so there is no way to reconcile Christianity and Islam.
Some people hold the view that God will be whatever you conceive him to be in this life. That is one of the most bizarre religious views I have heard. I’m not sure how they came to the conclusion that every human gets a designer god and that at death it would be just as one wished.
Consider the view of Mahatma Gandhi and Hinduism in general:
After long study and experience, I have come to the conclusion that [1] all religions are true; [2] all religions have some error in them; [3] all religions are almost as dear to me as my own Hinduism, in as much as all human beings should be as dear to one as one’s own close relatives. My own veneration for other faiths is the same as that for my own faith; therefore no thought of conversion is possible. (Mahatma Gandhi, All Men Are Brothers: Life and Thoughts of Mahatma Gandhi as told in his own words, Paris, UNESCO 1958, p 60.)
Yet the exclusive claims of Christianity prove Gandhi’s worldview (that of Hinduism) to be false. Among other things, the Bible claims at least one hundred times that Jesus is the only way to salvation. It also commands us not to worship idols and that we die once and then face judgment (it does not hold to reincarnation). Those are key elements of the Hindu faith. So if Hinduism is true then Christianity cannot be true. But if Hinduism is correct in stating that all religions are true, then Christianity must be true. But Christianity claims to be the one true path, so if it is true then Hinduism is not.
Also, Hinduism claims that Christianity is true, so if Christianity is false then so is Hinduism. Either way, the logic of Gandhi and Hinduism collapses on itself.
When I share the Gospel with people I do so as respectfully as possible. But I always try to work in examples like the above to highlight that under no circumstances can we both be right about the nature of God and salvation.
I used to hold the position of religious pluralism. We studied world religions about 15 years ago in an Adult Sunday School class and, sadly, didn’t dig very deep (I was attending church but not really a believer . . . at best I was “saved and confused.”) Most of us walked away thinking the religions were “all pretty much the same” and with no incentive to go out and make a case for Christianity.
So why did I – and so many people today, including Christians – embrace bad pluralism? I think it is typically out of a lack of clear thinking on the topic. When you examine the essentials of these faiths it is not that hard to show how they are irreconcilable.
Political correctness and fear contribute as well. It is easy to deny the exclusivity of Jesus (or the truth claims of whatever faith one follows) if one wants to avoid controversy. But as unpopular as it is to make truth claims, it is really a rather logical thing to do. The one claiming all religions are true needs to back up that claim with their evidence and logic. Just rattle off a list of religions, sects and cults and ask why they are all true. Just be careful saying things like, “Hinduism has a lot of sects.” If you say it too quickly people will have surprised looks on their faces.
Sheer laziness is another factor. Knowing enough about one’s faith to defend it in the marketplace of ideas is hard work. Religious pluralism is a great excuse not to evangelize.
I expect many non-Christians to say that all paths lead to God, but it really bothers me when Christians do so. They should meditate on this passage, among others:
Galatians 1:8-9 But even if we or an angel from heaven should preach a gospel other than the one we preached to you, let him be eternally condemned! As we have already said, so now I say again: If anybody is preaching to you a gospel other than what you accepted, let him be eternally condemned!
I like to combine elements of Hinduism and Scientology, which is why I believe I am L. Ron Hubbard reincarnated.
Nice and philosophical — but correct nonetheless
That’s tough to wrap around my little brain after a long day of work. So glad I know the ONE way to salvation. Thanks for sharing!
Thanks for posting this Neil. I understand it and I agree with it, but I can’t express it as well as you do.
Hey Chance,
Live long & prosper. Or as they say on my home planet – Nanu-Nanu. Sorry, I just couldn’t resist that. My dream is to run into Tom Cruise some day & greet him with that :>). Only problem is, he’d probably think I was serious.
Have a great day folks.
Amen brother. Too many spout the “many paths to God” rhetoric. Such paths lead only to destruction.
Neil, in re: “Most of us walked away thinking the religions were “all pretty much the same” and with no incentive to go out and make a case for Christianity.”
What blinds religious Americans to the realities of Islam? Part of the answer lies in how they regard religion per se.
From early childhood, most Americans are taught that religion is a personal matter and not a subject of polite conversation (unless you know someone well enough to know that you will not tread on toes by having such a discussion). You learn that religion must be accorded “special handling,” and that religion is “above criticism.” By the time they reach adulthood, many people have developed a powerful aversion to regarding any religion as anything other than basically good. It goes like this: Religion is good; Islam is a religion; therefore, Islam is good.
Muslims exploit this Achilles heel in Americans. Groups such as the Council for American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) follow the pattern of the civil rights industry. Any whiffle of critical questioning or criticism of Islam brings the cheap suits of CAIR to full throat. As a result, many critics of Islam, infected with political correctness, back down. Were they secure in their positions, critics would stand up to these pressure groups to defend their values. Islamic pressure groups, meanwhile, masterfully exploit the confusion by playing this “religion card,” along with racial, cultural, and immigrant cards, all of the current tools of “victimism.”
Jihadists wreak death and destruction over and over, in a global “ring of fire” all around the world, wherever Islam meets non-Islam. Their fellows create mayhem inside America, paralyzing its citizens with doubts about their relationship with Islam. They do it for Allah and Islam. In the sense that Muslims get away with their bullying and their demands for special treatment, privileges, and unfair, undeserved advantages, it all means that we are not only accepting, but reinforcing Muslim bad behaviors and assertions. This makes us our own worst enemy.
The goal of Islam is to force all of the world’s people to submit. “Submission” is the meaning of the word “Islam.” Submission will be accomplished through force or by voluntary conversion. (I must add here the extremely powerful attraction of Islamia to Nazism when the latter “flowered.”)
For this reason, we need to close off all avenues exploited by Islamists, from immigration to deception to intimidation. But, before we can do that, we must strip Islam of its “protected” status as a “religion” in the minds of good Americans.
TheReligionBarrier http://www.6thcolumnagainstjihad.com/a_gmason_p4.htm
Hank
Hank,
what you are writting is so silly …
Leave all frustration behind and medidate a bit.
Kea
Hank,
You position on minotiry religions was predicted back in the seventies by several writers, scholors and pundits on the left.
It makes a very convincing case for those warning us about the dangers of Christian Reconstructualism, Christian Identity, and Dominionism.
“Jesus was either the Messiah (Christianity) or He was not the Messiah (Judaism and others), but He cannot be both the Messiah and not the Messiah.”
The law of non-contradiction only states that nothing can both be and not be at the same time and [i]in the same respect.[/i] Religious pluralism does not hold all religions to be true in the same respect. It does not hold that Jesus is both the messiah and not the messiah in the same respect. It states that all religions are true as culturally influenced metaphorical conceptions of the Divine. The Divine, being immutable and incomprehensible, is not, and cannot be literally represented by any of the world’s religions.
Andy
Hi Andy,
I agree with your definition of the law of non-contradiction and that is what I assumed for all those examples – the same definition for the Messiah, the crucifixion, death vs. reincarnation, etc.
Can you elaborate on your final point? Just because we can’t know God completely doesn’t mean He couldn’t reveal to us what He wanted us to know. How would you “know” that He wasn’t 100% comprehensible if He hadn’t communicated that?
“Just because we can’t know God completely doesn’t mean He couldn’t reveal to us what He wanted us to know.”
I’ve done more than say we can’t know God completely. Many religious pluralists would argue that you can’t “know” the Divine at all, only that it can be experienced as a religious or mystical experience.
Note that I’m using the term ‘Divine’ where you are using the term ‘God’ and referring to said God as ‘He’. By saying that ‘God’ could have revealed himself to us, you are assuming that the term ‘God’ is acceptable in referring to the Divine before you have even appealed to the possibility that the Divine could have revealed itself to us. It seems as though you are making a crucial assumption here. That is, in order for a particular scripture to be the revealed word of God, the Divine itself must be ‘God’. Taoists and polytheists would certainly object to that description. The ancient Pythagoreans thought numbers to be divine. One could argue that materialists think even matter to be divine. To assume that God revealed himself to us is to assume that the Divine is a God.
“How would you “know” that He wasn’t 100% comprehensible if He hadn’t communicated that?”
To say that the Divine is ineffable is not, I believe, a description of the Divine itself. Rather, it is a description of the properties of the Divine. It is not something that describes the Divine as it is, it is something that describes the properties and attributes of the Divine. Specifically, it says that none of those properties or attributes can be known.
The fact that the Divine is ineffable and incomprehensible (to us) is illustrated by the complete incommensurability between the two definitions of the words: That which is not divine is finite, dependent, mutable, contingent, etc… That which is divine is infinite, independent, immutable, necessary, etc… By definition, there is no point of comparison between the two.
To further my original point, Because all religions are true as culturally influenced metaphorical conceptions of the divine, they are not all true in the same respect. Culture A uses the metaphors of Jesus Christ as the son of God, and culture B uses the metaphors of Allah, Muhammed, etc… Both conceptions are true as metaphors, and both metaphors differ because the cultures they originated in were considerably different. Religion A is true by way of its metaphor. Religion B is true by way of its metaphor, and so on.
Although it may seem as though I am attempting to sway your viewpoint, that isn’t my intention at all. The way that I see it, religious beliefs are formed by experience. I don’t know of anyone who picked their beliefs after they heard the conclusion of some argument. But if religious beliefs are formed by experience, I find it to be completely insensitive to tell the billions on this earth who don’t follow Christianity, that Christianity is true, and their beliefs about the Divine are simply wrong. It is a greater rarity for someone to adopt a different religion than it is for someone to reject religion altogether. Our religious cultural conditionings are very strong, and it seems absurd to me to suppose that the millions of Muslims, Buddhists, Jews, Taoists, etc… should simply reject their entire life experience of religious conditioning and adopt Christianity, just as it seems absurd to me to suppose that a Christian should reject her entire life of cultural conditioning and become a Muslim or some other exclusivist position.
Andy
By the way, thanks for allowing me to discuss this with you on your blog.
Hi Andy,
Thanks for clarifying your points. I think your first section actually supports my premise: Religions make mutually exclusive truth claims so they can’t all be true in the same ways.
You lost me a bit in the next section when you referred to the cultural impacts and metaphors. No religion has the concepts that Christianity does: All are sinners, you can’t work your way into God’s favor, sins must be punished, Jesus took that punishment, you are only saved by God’s grace, etc.
Islam requires you to be 51% good (roughly speaking) to get into Heaven or to take out a bunch of infidels on your way out. It is irreconcilable with Christianity.
Christianity is clear in claiming that Jesus is the only way to salvation. So it is either right or it is wrong. I believe that the evidence for Jesus’ life, death and resurrection are compelling, so I put my trust in him.
I do think that Buddhists, Muslims, etc. should reject their faiths and follow Jesus. If I didn’t think He was the only way then I would follow another path.
“I don’t know of anyone who picked their beliefs after they heard the conclusion of some argument.”
I did. And I know many others who did. Most of the early church formed their beliefs that way. They left Judaism or some pagan worship to follow the one true God.
I think it is completely logical to say that billions of people are wrong. If Buddha was right then Jesus was wrong, and if Jesus was right then Buddha was wrong. These aren’t just metaphors, these are specific truth claims: The nature of God, sin, grace, eternal life, reincarnation vs. one life, etc. Metaphors may be used to express these concepts, but the concepts are quite different.
Peace,
Neil
What was the argument that convinced you of the truth of Christianity? Were you religious before that? Did you grow up in a Christian family or did you interact with Christians? If you could take a guess, what was and is the ratio of Christians to people of other faiths that you have interacted with in your life?
Neil said: There were many arguments, but the main one was the evidence for the resurrection. Some people have a major moment of belief or a religious experience. Mine was a more gradual process. I’ll be glad to share more if you like, but my main point here is that it doesn’t matter where you were born or what religion your parents were – God’s attributes do not change.
To me, arguments and rational analysis about religious matters are way too incomplete and contentious to base my entire belief structure and lifestyle after, (which is precisely what a religious belief ought to do). To me, only personal experience can provide enough substance for such a decision.
I suppose that would depend on how you define “personal experience.” I came to believe through personal experiences (aren’t all our experiences personal?) but didn’t have Jesus appear to me in some dramatic way.
I don’t mean to seem indignant, but I would surmise that there was a lot more to your acceptance of Christianity as well. Perhaps a religious experience, or more specifically, an experience of a personal relationship with Christ, or the influence of your cultural upbringing, or an appreciation for Christian morals, or an acceptance of an authority – the bible, for instance, etc… It seems quite convenient to me that you accepted Christianity and not Islam or Wicca in a country where Christianity is the norm.
Check out how the church is growing rapidly in S. America, Africa and parts of Asia and how it has declined in America and Europe. This goes against your suppositions.
“Most of the early church formed their beliefs that way.”
Do you have any sources to site, or evidence to give for this statement?
Yes. The New Testament (plenty of conversion stories there – check out the book of Acts and see how the Gospel was shared) and lots of secular historians from the 1st / 2nd centuries such as Josephus and Pliny the Younger.
Andy
Andy, I put some answers above for readability.
I would encourage you to consider one of my specific claims, such as the fact that Hinduism and Christianity cannot both be right about the afterlife. Either reincarnation is true or we die and then face judgment (or perhaps we are gone forever, as in atheism). But under no circumstances can more than one of these be true.
You seem to be caught up in what you think is the right way for God to work. But you don’t get to define that. He either revealed himself to us or He didn’t (or the “Divine” revealed itself to us or didn’t, or however you want to say it). Religions make truth claims and those can be investigated. Truth is that which corresponds to reality.
Maybe it would be easier to see where I’m coming from if I explain myself from a Kantian perspective. The philosopher Immanuel Kant spoke of two conceivable ‘worlds’. The first is what he called the noumenal world, or that which exists independently of human perception, and is directly unaccessible. The second is the phenoumenal world, or in other words, the noumenal world as indirectly perceived by humans. The difference between these two can be explained by the following analogy. The sun is too bright to see without protection. It is directly unperceivable and so we are unable to observe it directly as it is. This would mimic the noumenal world. However, we are able to observe the sun through protective equipment, and other various means. This would be the phenoumenal world. We are not able to see the sun as it is directly, instead we must see it through dark tinted lenses and other such equipment.
Now if person A were using a particular piece of equipment to view the sun that tinted the view by say, 5 degrees, and person B were using a piece of equipment to view the sun that tinted the view by say, 7 degrees, then their perceptions and observations would no doubt be different. However, we would not argue that one of them has the ‘true’ perception of the sun. In effect, both representations are true and accurate, as well as an ‘unreal’ and colored.
Kant placed all sorts of things within the category of noumenal. That is, for him, there were all sorts of things that cannot be directly understood. I don’t necessarily agree about all of the things he placed in that category, but I do think that the Divine is one of them. We have no way to observe it direcly. Nor do we have any unmediated conceptual access to its nature. As human beings, we have the inclination to believe that it exists, and as such, different cultures have used different “pieces of equipment” or metaphors to understand the Divine. The metaphors used are in large part influenced by the respective cultures themselves. Thus all of the representations of the Divine are true to the extent that they are all indirect, and convoluted, and at the same time genuine representations of the Divine. That they are all metaphorical is because the nature of the Divine is ineffable to us. Human language and thought does the best it can in representing the ideas and concepts behind something that, by definition (divine vs. non-divine), is so far beyond our grasp that we can only use metaphors and analogies.
And that kind of metaphorical language is amply present within religious traditions themselves. To call Jesus Christ ‘the son of God’ obviously means something very different than the way we use the phrase in ordinary language. Son, and father are concepts that by way of our experiences, and by strict definition, are limited to biological processes. To extropolate the idea to a non-biological situation is to introduce a metaphor. For example, to say that Henry Ford was the father of the modern automobile, is to metaphorically state the relationship between Henry Ford and modern automobiles. Since the ideas of God and Jesus Christ are much harder to understand than Henry Ford and the automobile, the concept can only be metaphorical to a larger degree.
Andy, all of your examples and Kant’s as well ignore that if God chose to reveal himself then that changes everything. He could make himself clearly known. People still have the free will to follow any one of the man-made religions but that doesn’t change the fact that the real God revealed himself and told us just what we needed to know.
Have you ever studied Romans? I’m just starting to review it on my Bible Study Blog. It addresses many things, including how God revealed himself to us in creation, our conscience and in Christ. I especially encourage you to read Romans 1.
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There are a couple of problems with your post. Firstly, most Hindus believe in a personal God. 70% of Hindus are vishnavites, who believe that Vishnu is the ultimate and personal manifestation of God, often as an avaratr, such as Krishna or Rama. 25% are Shavaits who see Shiva as the ultimate personal manifestation of God. Many of the remaining 5% see God as personal also.
Also you say that Hinduism believes Christianity to be true. A more accurate representation would be to say that some (probably a majority) of Hindus believe that there is truth in Christianity, and that Jesus’s message if interpreted in light of vedic knowledge can be seen to be true. The book the sermon on the mount according to vedanta is an example of such an interpretation. I am not sure that most mainstream Christians would agree with such an interpretation.
Thank you for making people think. I like that saved and confused. I’m going to use that one. It described me at a time.
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