God Is Not One: The Eight Rival Religions That Run the World
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Authors: Stephen Prothero
Tags: #Religion, #General, #History, #Reference
God Is
Not One
The Eight Rival Religions
That Run the World—and Why
Their Differences Matter
Stephen Prothero
To my students
Human goals are many, not all of them commensurable, and in
perpetual rivalry with one another.
—Isaiah Berlin
Contents
A Note on Dates and Diacriticals
Chapter Nine - A Brief Coda on Atheism
A Note on Dates and Diacriticals
Scholarly books on religion often use diacritical marks to indicate how a word is pronounced in Sanskrit or other sacred languages. In fact, use of diacriticals is a key way to signal one’s scholarly bona fides. But diacritical marks are gibberish to most readers—is that a breve (˘) or a cedilla (¸)?—so I avoid them here except in direct quotations, proper names, and citations. If an “s” with a mark underneath or atop it is pronounced like “sh,” then it appears here as “sh”: the Hindu god Shiva instead of S
´
iva, the Hindu goal of moksha instead of moks¸a. Diacritical marks also present a barrier to the integration of non-Christian religious terms into English—a barrier that is better torn down than built up. One reason the Sanskrit term
nirva
-
n
.
a
made it into English dictionaries was its willingness to drop the macron over the a and the underdot accompanying the n. And Hindu scriptures such as the Mahâbhârata and the Râmâyana are already finding wide acceptance among English speakers without their respective circumflexes.
Religious Studies scholars also typically date events either as
C.E.
(Common Era) or
B.C.E.
(before the Common Era), in an effort to avoid the Christian bias inherent in
A.D.
(Anno Domini, “in the year of our Lord”) and
B.C.
(“before Christ”). This is sleight of hand since these dates continue to mark events in relation to the life of Jesus whether or not those events are said to have occurred in
C.E.
or
A.D.
However, since the use of
A.D.
and
B.C.
indirectly imply belief in Jesus as both “Lord” and “Christ,” I use
C.E.
and
B.C.E.
here. Muslims have their own calendar, which begins with the
hijra
(“flight” or “emigration”) of Muhammad from Mecca to Medina in 622
C.E
. So while this book appears in 2010
C.E.
, it is also being published in
A.H.
1431.
At least since the first petals of the counterculture bloomed across Europe and the United States in the 1960s, it has been fashionable to affirm that all religions are beautiful and all are true. This claim, which reaches back to
All Religions Are One
(1795) by the English poet, printmaker, and prophet William Blake, is as odd as it is intriguing.
1
No one argues that different economic systems or political regimes are one and the same. Capitalism and socialism are so obviously at odds that their differences hardly bear mentioning. The same goes for democracy and monarchy. Yet scholars continue to claim that religious rivals such as Hinduism and Islam, Judaism and Christianity are, by some miracle of the imagination, essentially the same, and this view resounds in the echo chamber of popular culture, not least in Dan Brown’s multi-million-dollar
Da
Vinci Code
franchise.
The most popular metaphor for this view portrays the great religions as different paths up the same mountain. “It is possible to climb life’s mountain from any side, but when the top is reached the trails converge,” writes philosopher of religion Huston Smith. “At base, in the foothills of theology, ritual, and organizational structure, the religions are distinct. Differences in culture, history, geography, and collective temperament all make for diverse starting points. . . . But beyond these differences, the same goal beckons.”
2
This is a comforting notion in a world in which religious violence often seems more present and potent than God. But is it true? If so, what might be waiting for us at the summit?
According to Mohandas Gandhi, “Belief in one God is the cornerstone of all religions,” so it is toward this one God that all religious people are climbing. When it comes to divinity, however, one is not the religions’ only number. Many Buddhists believe in no god, and many Hindus believe in thousands. Moreover, the characters of these gods differ wildly. Is God a warrior like Hinduism’s Kali or a mild-mannered wanderer like Christianity’s Jesus? Is God personal, or impersonal? Male, or female (or both)? Or beyond description altogether?
Like Gandhi, the Dalai Lama affirms that “the essential message of all religions is very much the same.”
3
In his view, however, what the world’s religions share is not so much God as the Good—the sweet harmony of peace, love, and understanding that religion writer Karen Armstrong also finds at the heart of every religion. To be sure, the world’s religious traditions
do
share many ethical precepts. No religion tells you it is okay to have sex with your mother or to murder your brother. The Golden Rule can be found not only in the Christian Bible and the Jewish Talmud but also in Confucian and Hindu books. No religion, however, sees ethics alone as its reason for being. Jews understand
halakha
(“law” or “way”) to include ritual too, and the Ten Commandments begin with how to worship God.
To be fair, those who claim that the world’s religions are one and the same do not deny the undeniable fact that they differ in some particulars. Obviously, Christians do not go on pilgrimage to Mecca, and Muslims do not practice baptism. Religious paths do diverge, Huston Smith admits, in the “foothills” of dogma, rites, and institutions.
4
To claim that all religions are the same, therefore, is not to deny the differences among a Buddhist who believes in no god, a Jew who believes in one God, and a Hindu who believes in many gods. It is simply to claim that the mathematics of divinity is a matter of the foothills. Debates over whether God has a body (yes, say Mormons; no, say Muslims) or whether human beings have souls (yes, say Hindus; no, say Buddhists) do not matter, because, as Hindu teacher Swami Sivananda writes, “The fundamentals or essentials of all religions are the same. There is difference only in the non-essentials.”
5
This is a lovely sentiment but it is dangerous, disrespectful, and untrue. For more than a generation we have followed scholars and sages down the rabbit hole into a fantasy world in which all gods are one. This wishful thinking is motivated in part by an understandable rejection of the exclusivist missionary view that only you and your kind will make it to heaven or Paradise. For most of world history, human beings have seen religious rivals as inferior to themselves—practitioners of empty rituals, perpetrators of bogus miracles, purveyors of fanciful myths. The Age of Enlightenment in the eighteenth century popularized the ideal of religious tolerance, and we are doubtless better for it. But the idea of religious unity is wishful thinking nonetheless, and it has not made the world a safer place. In fact, this naive theological groupthink—call it Godthink—has made the world more dangerous by blinding us to the clashes of religions that threaten us worldwide. It is time we climbed out of the rabbit hole and back to reality.
The world’s religious rivals do converge when it comes to ethics, but they diverge sharply on doctrine, ritual, mythology, experience, and law. These differences may not matter to mystics or philosophers of religion, but they matter to ordinary religious people. Muslims do not think that the pilgrimage to Mecca they call the hajj is inessential. In fact, they include it among the Five Pillars of Islam. Catholics do not think that baptism is inessential. In fact, they include it among their seven sacraments. But religious differences do not just matter to religious practitioners. They have real effects in the real world. People refuse to marry this Muslim or that Hindu because of them. And in some cases religious differences move adherents to fight and to kill.
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 big, happy family. But this sentiment, however well-intentioned, is neither accurate nor ethically responsible. God is not one. Faith in the unity of religions is just that—faith (perhaps even a kind of fundamentalism). And the leap that gets us there is an act of the hyperactive imagination.
Allergic to Argument
One reason we are willing to follow our fantasies down the rabbit hole of religious unity is that we have become uncomfortable with argument. Especially when it comes to religion, we desperately want everyone to get along. In my Boston University courses, I work hard to foster respectful arguments. My students are good with “respectful,” but they are allergic to “argument.” They see arguing as ill-mannered, and even among friends they avoid it at almost any cost. Though they will debate the merits of the latest Coen brothers movie or U2 CD, they agree not to disagree about almost everything else. Especially when it comes to religion, young Americans at least are far more likely to say “I feel” than “I think” or (God forbid) “I believe.”
The Jewish tradition distinguishes between arguing for the sake of victory (which it does not value) and “arguing for the sake of God” (which it does).
6
Today the West is awash in arguments on radio, television, and the Internet, but these arguments are almost always advanced not in service of the truth but for the purpose of ratings or self-aggrandizement or both. So we won’t argue for anyone’s sake and, when others do, we don’t see anything godly in it. The ideal of religious tolerance has morphed into the straitjacket of religious agreement.
Yet we know in our bones that the world’s religions are different from one another. As my colleague Adam Seligman has argued, the notion of religious tolerance assumes differences, since there is no need to tolerate a religion that is essentially the same as your own.
7
We pretend these differences are trivial because it makes us feel safer, or more moral. But pretending that the world’s religions are the same does not make our world safer. Like all forms of ignorance, it makes our world more dangerous. 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 or respecting.
Pretend Pluralism
Huston Smith’s
The World’s Religions
has sold over two million copies since it first appeared in 1958 as
The Religions of Man.
One source of its success is Smith’s earnest and heartfelt proclamation of the essential unity of the world’s religions. Focusing on the timeless ideals of what he calls “our wisdom traditions,” Smith emphasizes spiritual experience, keeping the historical facts, institutional realities, and ritual observances to a minimum. His exemplars are extraordinary rather than ordinary practitioners—mystics such as Islam’s al-Ghazali, Christianity’s St. John of the Cross, and Daoism’s Zhuangzi. By his own admission, Smith writes about “religions at their best,” showcasing their “cleaner side” rather than airing their dirty laundry, emphasizing their “inspired” philosophies and theologies over wars and rumors thereof. He writes sympathetically and in the American idioms of optimism and hope. When it comes to religion, Smith writes, things are “better than they seem.”
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