The Problem of Many Religions David Elliot Originally published in Issue VI of Vulgata, April 2002.  Picture by Aaron Jasinski.

If in some favoured moment the earnest skeptic sees past all the mechanistic madness and ugly parodies of truth now extant to the "gleams of celestial strength and beauty" sent as a call home to us from a sunny Eden hereafter; his vision may yet be draped in shadows.  His nascent sense of spiritual yearning may be lost in the jungle of competing religions that sprawl from the bedrock of ancient civilizations right onto our doorsteps.  Such a man may know that he is out of joint.  He may be a mere cog in the wheel of some claptrap factory, or (worse) one of the brood of dragons that sired it.  But whether puppet, or puppet-master; slave, or slave-driver, something wakes up in him one day, and he is changed.  He begins to hunger for some other food than this earthly stuff, and then the search begins.  But with so many religions all claiming to be the fullness of truth, the search may be a little dizzying.  Is it Christianity, Buddhism, Islam, Hinduism, Judaism or all of them?  Here, the medley’s the rub. The modern seeker of religious truth may feel somewhat like a hospital patient ambushed by a dozen doctors all at once, each of them lustily brandishing the surgeon's knife.  Each contradicts the others and claims to have the real cure to his sickness, and each shouts down the rest in a seemingly frantic bid to peddle his wares.  It is no wonder, then, that his brains swim.  And because we are allergic to that strange beast, Thought, we often content ourselves with an ostrich-like burying of the head in the sand, or a vague dreamer's raising of it into the clouds.  We cravenly despair, and send all doctors away; or we blush with naivete, and tell them all to ply their scalpels.  So we get either no treatment, or clashing treatments - death by indifference, or death by overdose.  But how about if one of the doctors had, or potentially had, the Elixir of Life in the nape of his hand?  Would it make all the ruck of sifting through conflicting truth claims worthwhile?  But since at this point we don't even know how, or whether we even should, do so, a closer look is clearly what is needed.

You will forgive me if I am forced to begin somewhat technically here, but unless we want Emerson's "Men are more eager to praise and to dispraise than to describe and to define" to get a rousing "touche!", we'd better tread carefully.  The devil is in the details, and there is no way to exorcise him if he is just dismissed with a snort.  So to begin with, we would do well to remember that Religion, broadly speaking, can be defined as the search for spiritually fulfilling answers to the fundamental questions of origin, meaning, morality, and destiny.  Or, where we came from, why we are here, how we should behave, and where we are going.  This is the what of religion, and it exists because there is a love just behind all other loves for which we were made, and we know it - even when fuddled with salvation by status quo.  Religion expresses itself (again, broadly speaking) through creed, code, and cult.  Or, what we believe, how we are to behave, and how we worship; theology, ethics, and liturgy.  This is the how of Religion and it exists because we naturally desire to know the One we were made to love, and we do this by uniting our wills to His and by reaching out in adoration.  So far so good.  But here is where the horns and hoofs creep in.  There are a variety of religions on the market each claiming to be the fullness of truth, but since on several key points they each make claims that contradict the others, a nice reconciliation seems to be a case of trying to fit square pegs into round holes.  Why is this?  Simply by virtue of the logical law of non-contradiction.  This states that contradictory propositions cannot both be true at the same time.  For example: the propositions "God exists" and "God does not exist" cannot both be true, since one cancels out the other, as paper cancels out rocks, and scissors cancels out paper in the popular schoolyard game.  But if the daft postmodernist, trendily dismissing logic as mere fable, denies this in theory, he only proves it in practice.  To explicitly reject the law of non-contradiction is to implicitly embrace it, for if I reject it, I imply that there is some difference between contradiction and non-contradiction, and show that I prefer the former to the latter.  Thus, even if the front door to truth is blocked by a portcullis, the back door sweetly whispers "Come through me."  Postmodernist denials of logic are similar to the tenet, now gospel in academia, that there is no such thing as truth.  But if this is the case, then the proposition "There is no such thing as truth" would be true, and if anything is true, then there must be truth.  It too is a reductio ad absurdum, a statement that reduces itself to contradiction.  So there is no haven to be found in the denial of logic or the liquidation of meaning in speech.  Words are somewhat like bees: if you cultivate them, they yield honey; but if you attack them, they sting right back.  And we see just this in the self-eliminating nature of statements made by the would-be debunkers of logic.

Having dealt with this red herring, we can then proceed to the logical meat and bones of the problem of many religions and the myriad reactions that it has sparked.  Two very popular solutions to the problem are pluralism and exclusivism.  Pluralism states that all religions are really one in spirit if not in the letter, and that behind the conceptual latticework of each religious tradition the same underlying experience of Ultimate Reality is to be found.  Religion is looked upon as "man's search for God", and the different religious traditions are seen as so many different paths that converge at the same mountain summit.  Exclusivism holds that God is love, and that love is self-communicating, therefore God has revealed Himself to humanity in the highest and most definitive way possible, viz. By extending Spirit to its terminus, matter, and wedding Divinity to mortal flesh (the Incarnation).  Religion is thus looked upon as "God's search for man", and the view is that God Himself descended from the mountain summit to rescue man from the vale of tears below.  It needs no footnote to explain that such a revelation is considered definitive.  Where the rubber meets the road, then, pluralism states that all religions are equally true, and exclusivism states that they are only true where they do not contradict what God has revealed (here is where the law of non-contradiction comes in).

But to make sure that we are not making a golem into a strawman, we’d better take a closer look at what the pluralists actually hold and then see if there is any solidity to their claims.  The most eminent of modern pluralists, John Hick, argues in his book God and the Universe of Faiths  (considered the unofficial Bible of pluralism) that human beings have been evolving spiritually from earliest times, where Aztec-style sacrifice and slavish propitiation dominated, to more recent times, where a breaking in of divine self-revelation and illumination manifested itself.  Around 800-300 B.C. came what he calls "the golden age of religious creativity" when sages like Buddha, Zoroaster, Confucius, Lao-Tzu, Pythagoras, Socrates, and many Old Testament prophets taught and wrote.  He sees each of these major movements as examples of “pluriform divine revelation”, all of which were necessary due to the lack of today's mass communications.  Neither is better than the others, rather they are all suited to a particular geography, culture, and temperament.  Each "religio-cultural complex" evolves separately, but gradually they begin to touch and intermingle until we reach the highly inter-religious society of today.  Hick claims that the contradictory claims of various religions need not set them at odds with each other.  "The ultimate divine reality is infinite" he says, "and as such transcends the grasp of the human mind."  Thus he concludes that our minds can only comprehend "a finite and partial image of the divine." But surely such a leap smacks of generalization?  Firstly, no religion ever claimed that a man can fully comprehend God with his finite mind; and secondly, such a statement merely circumvents the practical problems arising from competing truth claims.  For example: Judaism, Christianity, Islam, and Sikhism each state that there is one lifetime for each person and then a general resurrection of the dead at the end of the world.  Hinduism and Buddhism both claim that the soul evolves over countless ages through a near infinity of life forms until it reaches perfection and is dissolved in the ocean of the absolute.  By virtue of the law of non-contradiction, then, this situation is an either/or, rather than a both/and.  To merely state that these are nonessential differences is not a tenable position to hold, since they are quite definite theories about a real as versus a metaphorical end.  It is either Resurrection or Reincarnation, but not both of them.  If the pluralist (as often happens) states that these may both be inspired analogies of our true, as yet undisclosed end, he has still not solved the problem.  This simply means that a third claimant has entered the lists with their own theory on man's destiny, which just moves the goal post further by adding another rival claim.  Given this, Hick's conception that religions really say the same thing only in different ways is highly doubtful on many points and would not be supported by those religions' adherents.

Hick also argues that "in some ninety-nine percent of the cases the religion which an individual professes … depends upon the accidents of birth.  Someone born to Buddhist parents in Thailand is very likely to be a Buddhist, someone born to Muslim parents in Saudi Arabia to be a Muslim, someone born to Christian parents in Mexico to be a Christian, and so on” The conclusion is that it would be arbitrary and almost tribalistic to assert that the religion in which one finds oneself is superior to the others, since our religious beliefs are largely a matter of geography, culture, and history.  The argument is a classic one.  But if what Hick means by it is that happenstance of itself undercuts a given truth claim, then the argument is self-defeating.  If what Hick says is true, then we can no more believe in pluralism than in any given religion, for if the pluralist were born, say, in medieval Spain or modern day Egypt, he probably wouldn’t have been a pluralist.  The sociological argument is thus a dialectical shot in the foot that by ignoring the working of Divine Providence, is more materialistic than it is religious.

One persuasive argument of the pluralists seems to lie in the fact that while the din of theologians may present conflicting accounts of the divinity, the living stuff of religion (its prayer and spirituality) seem to confirm the underlying unity of religions in that mystics and seekers use similar language and prayers.  It would therefore seem likely that their experiences are similar and point to the same reality.  Thus Hick, in quoting prayers from different religions in which God is spoken of as the eternal Lord of Creation and beloved of the cosmos, speaks of "the overlap and confluence of faiths." But to make the leap from similarity of language to similarity of reality experienced may be unfounded.  Perhaps an analogy may help to highlight this.  Suppose that two men from separate and isolated islands met in the middle of the sea.  On one island, the only indigenous flower was the lily, on the other island, the only flower was the tulip.  Now because only one type of flower grew on either island, the inhabitants never spoke of the “lily” or “tulip”, but only of “flower”.  The fact that there was only one type of flower made specific names unnecessary.  Now suppose that our two men start talking about the plant life on their respective islands.  Soon they begin to exclaim about the “flower”, assuming that they are talking about the same thing, when the one really has lilies in mind and the other is talking about tulips.  It is very much the same with religious language.  Would it, for example, really be fair to say that a Jew praying at the wailing wall in Jerusalem and a Buddhist meditating in a cave in Tibet are experiencing the same reality?  Given their varying dispositions and goals, we might as well say that a child picking strawberries on a farm in Kentucky and someone ice-fishing from an igloo in the Arctic are experiencing the same reality.  They would hold to the opposite, so who is the pluralist (who has not had their experiences) to say that their experiences are fundamentally the same?

In the Judeo-Christian tradition, Christ not only points out the way to salvation, He is the way to salvation.  But the term "salvation" in Hick's usage is sufficiently imprecise to arouse questioning.  After all, what is salvation for one may be damnation for another.  Consider, for example, the goals of Christianity and Buddhism respectively. Christianity believes that God has created us to know, to love, and to serve Him in this world, and to be happy with Him forever in eternity.  We become "sons of God" by adoption through Christ, and our individuality is a divine gift.  By contrast, Buddhism is agnostic regarding the Godhead and sees our goal as freeing ourselves from the world of suffering through a self-reliant enlightenment, after which one's individuality is dissolved.  Two more starkly contrasted goals could not be imagined.  They differ not only on the way to salvation, but on what salvation essentially is.  To confound the two, then, and use the word "salvation" as a term denoting a unified goal for both of them, would be misrepresentative.

Pluralism is also ambiguous with regard to that most paramount of concepts, divine revelation.  Hick states that the teachings of the Buddha, Lao-Tzu, the Upanishads, Christ etc “were all moments of divine revelation."  They may seem different, but that is a matter of perception, not reality.  To illustrate this he invokes the famous (or infamous) parable of the Elephant.  This is a little story going back (with some additions) to the Buddha himself, in which it is said that religious seekers are like men all cramped together with an elephant in a closet (evidently they did not require oxygen).  Each man touches some part of the elephant and because the light is switched off, they only know their part of it, and so they all end up by arguing about what it is like.  The man with the trunk says the elephant is like a snake.  The man with the ear says it is clearly like a fan.  The man with a leg swears it is like a pillar.  And so on.  The conclusion is that each religion “may be partly right, yet none completely so.”  But as colourful as this is, it is already an Eastern way of thinking that is anthropocentric rather than theocentric and that emphasizes experience and self-reliance over faith and God’s grace.  It is rather easy to prove that Buddhism and Christianity are the same thing when you use Buddhism (which views everything as the same thing to begin with) as your criteria.  As G.K. Chesterton wryly commented: “Buddhism and Christianity are very much the alike.  Especially Buddhism.”  But the very claim which Christianity makes (expressed by the Incarnation) and upon which it stands or falls, is that the “Elephant” of the parable, unimpressed with the musing of the closeted men, lifted up his mighty trunk and flicked on the light switch, becoming visible to all.  By pigeon-holing each religion into an accommodating “Everythingism”, the pluralist misrepresents religions that make specific truth claims in its sweeping, 21st century rush to be ten minutes ahead of the truth.

Suppose, for example, that we have positions A (Christianity), B (Hinduism), C (Islam), and D (Buddhism).  Over afternoon tea John and I begin a conversation that sees us, with no little heat, arguing the subject of religion.  Perhaps I believe that A (Christianity) is wholly right by virtue of being divinely revealed, and B-D partially right insofar as they square with A.  John, not at all edified by my line of thought, argues that that is just the problem with all of the religions.  At heart they are all egotistic and imperialistic, plying us with the cat-call of  "Look at me.  I am the one, and not these others."  But this is a child's way of looking at the world, he says.  Truth transcends the minutiae of cult and creed.  Each of these great religions is good and holy, but they only get part of the picture.  There is so much more that we have to see.”  As flattering to contemporary prejudice as such rhetoric is, John has in fact done the very thing he accused the great religions of.  In seeking to correct and amend their "aberrations", he has set up a further position, E, which will state (in practice) that truth is that which John, in his wisdom, has decided to retain from the teachings of A-D (Christ to Buddha), along with whatever pet ideas he has accumulated over the course of casual reading.  On the surface John appears to be humble, but he is really just honey-coating the sword.  In the final analysis, the last word on what is true in the religious question (origin, meaning, morality, and destiny) will come from John.  Position E, that is: "Johnism" has been born.  The only difference is that whereas the exclusivist wagers for the august and hallowed person of a Christ or a Buddha, the pluralists banks truth upon himself.  He is a prophet and a sect of one.  Here it is really the Christian who is humble, because he is only God's mail-deliverer - the pluralist seeks to be God's editor.

At this point the nicely shaven, clean-cut, nails-filed audience of polite, invincibly tolerant Canadians (who never raise their voices) will surely balk.  Perhaps it's in the blood.  If Catholicism was the state religion of medieval France, and Islam is the state religion of modern day Egypt, I think it is safe to say that multiculturalism is the state religion of present day Canada.  This is not to shred the maple leaf, though, by any means.  There is, quite naturally, beauty in diversity - that is God's idea; but there is no unity in contradictories - that is man's (rather bad) idea.  So if the idea of multiculturalism comes from the desire to live in harmony and concord with different peoples, it is good.  But if it is construed to mean that truth itself is the pet of cultural appetite rather than the light of nations, it is bad.  Multiculturalism has proven tonic in curing us of the crude, half-idiot hatreds that dogged generations past.  But in breaking our backs to be inclusive, we cannot forget that truth itself is necessary exclusive, for unless it excludes falsehood it cannot itself be true.  We desire to be loving and accepting of all people, but since truth is to our minds what love is to our hearts, to rubbish either is neither loving nor honest, but schizophrenic.  Thus, we are called to receive all people into the treasury of our hearts, but never to receive error into the treasury of our wisdom.  Perhaps it is our refusal to make this distinction that has left multiculturalism, as a charism meant to unite the
human family, monstrously half-created.

The Christian need not hold that other religions are simply false.  In fact, the position of the Catholic Church (inclusivism) states that other major world religions are neither divinely revealed nor diabolically inspired, but divinely intimated.  Thus, apart from other religions reflecting the truth insofar as they link up with the revealed religion, they could also play a role in paving the way for it, as Christians believe the Law did for the Jews.  After all, Christ said: "I came not to destroy, but to fullfill," (Matt 5:17) and in a case like St. Augustine's, another worldview did pave the way for his coming to Christianity, namely, Platonism. Other religions would therefore not merely be partial, but above all preparatory, and would be hallowed rather than impugned, like a father who, having lovingly raised his daughter, gives her away to her husband on their wedding day.

And what a wedding it is!  When the cry of the heart is filled by the “true light from true light”, and the little matchstick of the mind enflamed by the “true God from true God”, then the divine romance truly begins. G.K. Chesterton, on the eve of his reception into the Catholic Church, sang like a bard of this new life that Christ gave to him, saying:

The sages have a hundred maps to give
That trace their crawling cosmos like a tree,
They rattle reason out through many a sieve
That stores the sand, and lets the gold go free;
And all these things are less than dust to me
Because my name is Lazarus and I live.