God Is Not One: The Eight Rival Religions That Run the World (49 page)

Until quite recently, interfaith dialogue proceeded only among those for whom the doctrines and narratives of their traditions ran far behind the ethical imperative to get along with their neighbors. In other words, it was a game for religious liberals; religious conservatives need not apply. Today, however, young people are forging a new path—Interfaith Dialogue 2.0—that is open to traditional believers, and to nonbelievers as well, precisely because it recognizes that genuine dialogue across religious boundaries must recognize the existence of these boundaries and the fundamental difference between the lands they bisect.

At the Chicago-based Interfaith Youth Core run by Eboo Patel, there is no requirement that participants bargain to agreement. In fact, Patel actively discourages IFYC participants from discussing politics and theology. Instead, he sets them to work on community-based projects, encouraging them to discuss instead how their very different traditions impel them toward a shared commitment to service. As a result, Patel (who is Muslim himself) is able to get Orthodox Jews, conservative Catholics, and born-again Christians to work side-by-side. “Religion is a force in the world,” Patel says. “Whether it divides or unites is up to us.”
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Whether religion divides or unites also depends on whether we can learn to talk about it with some measure of empathetic understanding.

Among the casualties of the late, great culture wars is the recognition that there are two ways to talk about religion. There is the religious way of synagogue prayers and church sermons—the way that religious people preach
their
creeds,
their
gods,
their
rituals. But there is also a secular way to talk about religion. This second way does not assume that religion in general, or any religion in particular, is either true or false, because to make such an assumption is to be talking about religion religiously. It aims instead simply to observe and to report, as objectively as possible, on this thing human beings do, for good or for ill (or both).

There is a difference between doing art history and making art. Art historians can be artists, of course, but creating art and interpreting it are two very different projects. And so it goes with doing and interpreting religion. Some scholars of religion are religious, of course, but there is no faith requirement for the job, just as it is not necessary to be a sculptor or painter to be an art historian. Of course, scholars of religion often allow their own theological biases to slip into their work, speaking about religion in two ways at once. The problem with Godthink of either the New Atheist or the perennial philosophy variety is that each camp fails to see what should be obvious to any outsider—that theirs are theological positions too. When Richard Dawkins calls religion delusional, he is speaking as a theologian (or atheologian), not as an objective reporter. When Huston Smith calls all religions one, he is doing theology too.

If religion did not matter, this collective confusion would not cloud our understanding of the world. If human beings acted in their families, communities, and nations purely on the basis of greed and power, then economists and political scientists could do a decent job of describing the world. But people act every day on the basis of religious beliefs and behaviors that outsiders see as foolish or dangerous or worse. Allah tells them to blow themselves up or to give to the poor, so they do. Jesus tells them to bomb an abortion clinic or to build a Habitat for Humanity house, so they do. Because God said so, Jews, Christians, and Muslims believe that this land is their land, so they fight for it in the name of G-d or Jesus or Allah. Call this good news or bad news, but by any name it is the way things are. So if we want to live in the real world rather than down a rabbit hole of our own imagining then we need to reckon with it.

To reckon with the world as it is, we need religious literacy. We need to know something about the basic beliefs and practices of the world’s religions. This book has tried to offer this literacy. It has outlined how the eight rival religions wrestle with the human predicament—their problems, solutions, techniques, and exemplars. It has demonstrated how different religions emphasize different dimensions of religion—the ethical and ritual dimensions in Confucianism, for example, and the legal and narrative dimensions in Judaism. Along the way it has ranked these religions from the greatest of the great on down—from Islam to Christianity to Confucianism to Hinduism to Buddhism to Yoruba religion to Judaism to Daoism. But religious literacy of this sort is not enough.

Today we have plenty of Christians doing Christian theology in public, plenty of atheists doing atheology in public, and plenty of perennial philosophers telling the public that all religions are one. Our airwaves and bookstores are clogged with angry arguments for this religion and against that religion. On
Hardball
and other television shows that sound like they were named by adolescent boys, producers routinely pit ideologues on the Secular Left against ideologues on the Religious Right. So there is no shortage of religious (and antireligious) name-calling. What is missing is this second way of talking about religion—a voice that sounds more like the old-fashioned news gathering of CBS and the BBC than like the contemporary vituperations of Fox News and MSNBC. This book has tried to speak in this different voice, offering new ways to enter into the ten thousand gates of human religiosity.

There is a famous folk tale about blind men examining an elephant. It likely originated in India before the Common Era, but it eventually spread to East and Southeast Asia and then around the world. According to this folk tale, blind men are examining an elephant. One feels his trunk and declares it to be a snake. Another feels his tail and declares it a rope. Others determine that the elephant is a wall, pillar, spear, or fan, depending on where they are touching it. But each insists he is right, so much quarreling ensues.

Among true believers of the perennial philosophy sort, this story is gospel. In their eyes, the elephant is God and the blind men are Christians and Muslims and Jews who mistake their particular (and partial) perspectives on divinity for the reality of divinity itself. Because God is beyond human imagining, we are forever groping around for God in the dark. It is foolish to say that your religion alone is true and all other religions are false. No one has the whole truth, but each is touching the elephant. So, concludes the Hindu teacher (and inspiration for many perennialists) Ramakrishna, “one can realize God through all religions.”
⁷

But this folk tale also demonstrates how different religions are, since it has been told in various ways and put to various uses by various religious groups. Among Buddhists, it shows that speculation on abstract metaphysical questions causes suffering. Among Sufis, it shows that God can be seen through the heart but not the senses. Hindus read it as a parable about how “God can be reached by different paths.”
⁸
Finally, modern Western writers such as the British poet John Godfrey Saxe turn it into a tale of the stupidity of theology:

So oft in theologic wars,

The disputants, I ween,

Rail on in utter ignorance

Of what each other mean,

And prate about an Elephant

Not one of them has seen!
⁹

For me, this story is a reminder not of the unity of the world’s religions (as Ramakrishna and the perennialists would have us believe), or of their shared stupidity (as Saxe and the New Atheists would argue), but of the limits of human knowledge. It is commonplace to think of religions as unchanging dogmas demanding unqualified assent. And there are no doubt fundamentalists inside most religions who see things just this way. But one function of the transcendent is to humble us, remind us that our thoughts are not the thoughts of God or the Great Goddess—to remind us that, at least for the time being, we see through a glass, darkly. Yes, religious people offer solutions to the human predicament as they see it. Yet these solutions inevitably open up more questions than they close down. This is definitely true of Confucius and Hillel, who, perhaps more than any of the figures discussed in this book, followed Rilke’s admonition to “love the questions themselves.”
¹⁰
But it is also true of Muhammad, who once said, “Asking good questions is half of learning,” and of Jesus, whose parables seem designed less to teach us a lesson than to move us to scratch our heads.
¹¹

When it comes to safeguarding the world from the evils of religion, including violence by proxy from the hand of God, the claim that all religions are one is no more effective than the claim that all religions are poison. Far more powerful is the reminder that any genuine belief in what we call God should humble us, remind us that, if there really is a god or goddess worthy of the name, He or She or It must surely know more than we do about the things that matter most. This much, at least, is shared across the great religions.

Notes

Introduction

1
. The sole surviving copy of this book can be found at the Huntington Library and Art Gallery in San Marino, California. See it online at: http://www.blakearchive.org/exist/blake/archive/work.xq?workid=aro&java=yes. Blake wrote, “As all men are alike (tho infinitely various), so all religions . . . have one source,” which he referred to as “the Poetic Genius.”

2
. Huston Smith,
The World’s Religions: Our Great Wisdom Traditions
(New York: HarperSanFrancisco, 1991), 73.

3
. Dalai Lama,
An Open Heart: Practicing Compassion in Everyday Life
(Boston: Little, Brown, 2001), 8–9.

4
. Smith,
World’s Religions
, 73. “Those who circle the mountain, trying to bring others around to their paths, are not climbing,” Smith adds.

5
. Swami Sivananda, “The Unity That Underlies All Religions,” http://www.dlshq.org/religions/unirel.htm.

6
. See Reuven Firestone, “Argue, for God’s Sake—or, a Jewish Argument for Argument,”
Journal of Ecumenical Studies
39, no. 1–2 (2002): 47–57.

7
. Adam B. Seligman, “Tolerance, Tradition and Modernity,”
Cardozo Law Review
24, no. 4 (2003): 1645–56. In addition to writing sociological works on this topic, Seligman runs The Tolerance Project and the International Summer School on Religion and Public Life (http://www.issrpl.org).

8
. Smith,
World’s Religions
, 5, 388–89.

9
. Sivananda, “Unity That Underlies All Religions.”

10
. Hans Küng,
On Being a Christian
, trans. Edward Quinn (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1976), 98.

11
. Tracy McNicoll, “Courting Islamic Cash in France,”
Newsweek
, September 21, 2009, 12.

12
. W. E. B. DuBois,
The Souls of Black Folk: Etches and Sketches
(Chicago: A. C. McClurg, 1903), 23. I first heard this argument from Eboo Patel of the Interfaith Youth Core.

13
. Ninian Smart,
Dimensions of the Sacred: An Anatomy of the World’s Beliefs
(Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 1996).

14
. Abraham Joshua Heschel, “No Religion Is an Island,” in
No Religion Is an Island: Abraham Joshua Heschel and Interreligious Dialogue
, eds. Harold Kasimow and Byron L. Sherwin (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 1991), 3–22. “Parochialism has become untenable,” Heschel writes. “There was a time when you could not pry out of a Boston man that the Boston state house is not the hub of the solar system or that one’s own denomination has not the monopoly of the holy spirit. Today we know that even the solar system is not the hub of the universe” (5–6).

15
. Quoted in Eric J. Sharpe,
Comparative Religion: A History
(London: Duckworth, 1975), 36.

16
. I hope it is clear that I am not trying to revive the shopworn division of the world’s religions into orthodox “great traditions” of the lettered and heterodox “little traditions” of the unlettered. On this division, see, e.g., Clifford Wilcox,
Robert Redfield and the Development of American Anthropology
, 2nd ed. (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2006).