Why so many faiths?

 

Why so many faiths? I come across people who believe in God but will not sign up to a religion either due to the hypocrisy they read of or to confusion about which of many religions is most credible. People today are more aware of the variety of faiths across the world than their parents or grandparents through the revolution in global communications over the last half century. With so many faiths to choose from, they rightly ask, how do you decide which one is right? Elucidating, shedding light on the variety of faiths, risks being patronising towards faiths I have not known from the inside. I am impelled to do so by a conviction that the instinct for meaning, and hence religion, is in every human heart. This surely is why our species is called ‘homo sapiens’, translated ‘man who is wise’. I sense God’s love and holiness at work in believers from other faiths than my own, let alone unbelievers, and see how they contribute to the common good of society. They do so by upholding values such as compassion and truthfulness that derive from their vision of God and humanity. With the decline in religious practice in the UK people’s lives are being formed alarmingly more by what is legal, whether that be right or wrong, and the widespread influence of marketing, rather than by the moral framework owned by religion. This makes elucidation about how we see different faiths all the more important. Picture of people celebrating during Ramadan from Kevin O’Donnell ‘Inside World Religions’.

Should we have so many faiths - or any faiths? American professor of Jurisprudence Brian Leiter makes a salvo against tolerating religion at all questioning what he sees as the irrational and morally questionable nature of the variety of revelations of the divine.  Why should a Sikh boy be permitted to take his ceremonial knife to school and not a farmer's boy? Leiter challenges the legal protection afforded religious belief in western democracies asking why concerns of safety are made subordinate to its claims. His thesis builds on widely publicised bad behaviour of religious adherents to present a view that the common good, which law serves, needs purifying of the metaphysical element altogether as being not just beyond but destructively against reason. In his analysis Brian Leiter details religious beliefs as distinct from other beliefs in being not based on evidence and issuing in categorical demands even if they provide ‘existential consolation’. The conclusion of Leiter’s argument is that the state should tolerate religious claims of conscience but not give them the respect given them hitherto which subordinates the morally important objectives of safety, health, well-being and equal treatment before the law to such claims. The Sikh boy should surrender his dagger. Since religion serves cohesion in communities of faith it can also contribute to social division when people of different faith attempt to co-exist. The consequent conflicts fuel a perception, articulated by Leiter, that holding to faith is damaging and therefore mistaken. His arguments are parallel to those against the internet for fuelling partisan behaviour which discount its positive achievements in promoting the common good by putting so people in touch with one another.

At the other end of reflection on many faiths from this ‘plague on all your houses’ view are those who hold only their religion to be true and all others totally false. One thinks of ‘door to door religion sales folk’ like Jehovah’s Witnesses who will brook no dialogue. Years back Roman Catholics were said to hold ‘outside the church there is no salvation’ but now clearly deny this with recent teaching accepting in some degree the baptised of any Church and looking positively, from a salvation angle, on all who follow their conscience. A third perspective seems currently more fashionable than either dismissal of religion overall or dismissal of non-adherents of one’s own faith. It affirms all faiths are true so that contradictions between them are superficial. This Hindu parable captures its sense. ‘There were five blind Hindu holy men on the banks of the Ganges. A tame elephant wandered among them one day. One reached out and touched its body; he thought it was a wall of mud. One touched its tusks and thought these were two spears. One touched its trunk and thought it was a serpent. One touched its tail and thought it was a piece of rope. The last one laughed at them and held onto its leg. He said it was a tree after all. A child walked by and asked, ‘Why are you all holding the elephant?’ The story denies obvious contradictions between the truth claims of different faiths.

Holding that all religions are true in what they agree about is an attractive thesis, as are attempts at identifying a hierarchy of truth across faiths even if this goes counter to irreconcilable claims of divine revelation. Though people of faith have different views of God, there is agreement among devoted adherents about how partial a view they all have got. God is bigger than our vision of God and that of all religions. People of faith are agreed on the failings of hypocrisy, adherents whose nit-picking legalism seems unworthy of the Creator, of whom it would be just to say 'their God is too small'. By contrast there is much holiness among religious people. This connects with the idea 'all religions lead to God' proving religions help people encounter God and, so to speak, brush off holiness from him. In that sense, of creating holiness, no religion is completely right or wrong. However holy people can be mistaken. It is possible to follow fruitfully the truth you have received, to the best of your ability, only to one day wake up to find you're following a shadow of the truth. I remember reading the story of a Muslim lady who thought you reached God by moral effort until she discovered in Jesus Christ with great joy how we grow into a personal relationship with God not by effort but by his grace. This emphasis on grace leads some strains of Christianity to disavow the name of religion and its association with ritual practice almost as an insurance policy concerning one’s eternal destiny. Mainstream Churches though recognise common ground with other faiths concerning the vision of God despite awareness of undeniable disagreements. In Christianity God is seen as having a closeness or sameness to us alongside a distance or difference from us, expressed respectively as immanence and transcendence. In holding together God’s closeness yet otherness, his sameness yet difference, Christianity is in the middle of the spectrum of world religions. These range from the strongly transcendent vision of God in Islam and Judaism to the more immanent devotion found in Hindu and Buddhist societies which currently has great impact in the UK through meditation and mindfulness exercises borrowed from those sources.

Why so many faiths? Christ said: ‘I am the way, the truth and the life; no one comes to the Father except through’ and ‘everyone who is of the truth hears my voice.’ (John 14:6, 18:38). If everyone believed those scriptures there would be no  need to elucidate how Christians see other faiths because they would not exist!. Putting it in a more challenging way to Christians the existence of other religions is proof of their failure to meet with Jesus at a deep level and become the heart to heart draw they are meant to be through his magnetic love. What though of those who’re drawn elsewhere? Saying yes to Jesus does not mean saying ‘no’ to everything about other faiths. It can mean saying ‘yes, but…’ or rather ‘yes, and…’ to other faiths, which is a far more engaging and reasonable attitude. I say ‘yes’ to what Buddhists teach about detachment because Jesus teaches it and Christians often forget it. At the same time I must respectfully question Buddhists about the lack of a personal vision of God since I believe Jesus is God’s Son. I say ‘yes’ to what Muslims say about God’s majesty because sometimes Christians seem to domesticate God and forget his awesome nature. At the same time, I differ with Muslims about how we gain salvation, because I believe Jesus is God’s salvation gift and more than a prophet. Other faiths can wake us up to aspects of Christian truth that might otherwise get forgotten. What might happen, for example, if Christians were as serious in their spiritual discipline as many Buddhists are?’ Reflection upon experience of people of faith in our circle and the good seen in them like humility and self-forgetfulness can be profitable as a reminder of how people can live close to God outside the Church. To the question ‘Can religion lead you to God?’ biblical faith says yes in the sense of religion expressing love in return for love. In Christianity God leads us to God. ‘For God so loved the world that he gave his only Son, so that everyone who believes in him may not perish but may have eternal life’ (John 3:16).