I confess to often having some sympathy for non-ecumenicists and those who draw distinctions [between religions and religious traditions]. I don't expect Catholics to take their theology any less seriously than Mormons take theirs; and one theology excludes the other. It seems to me that if religion is meaningful it's serious business; if one is committed to divine truths then one is committed to the falsehood of rival claims. By my human standards "No man comes unto the father but through Me" is a terrible way to run a universe; but if there is a God I have no reason to think that His rules will conform to my contingent, twenty-first-century Western liberal human standards. And so I don't expect religious believers to softpedal the exclusionary implications of their beliefs. I don't think Unitarian Universalism is somehow a better religion than Catholicism or Mormonism or Orthodox Judaism just because its god seems to be so nice and inclusive; indeed, my sympathies for the aesthetic and moral-psychological experience of religious belief tends to run the other way. This is a bit like the stance of many American lapsed Catholcic or many Israeli secular Jews, I incline to say, "I don't believe in God, but the God in whom I don't believe is a serious one!" But I don't quite mean that. Rather, I want to say that if there is a point to religion and theology, then that point is undermined by the reluctance to draw distinctions and take them seriously.
I have no idea why this should be controversial, but it certainly is. I believe Christianity to be true, which means not so much that I believe other religions to be outright false, but that I judge their truthfulness based on how much they align with the Christian claim. Judaism is, therefore, more true from a Christian point of view than Zoroastrianism. I would be chagrined to hear, for example, a Muslim say that my Christian faith is no more true or false than his Islamic faith. We can't both be right. Either there is no God but Allah and Muhammad is his prophet, or not. All serious religious believers understand that religious claims are truth claims about how the world is, not how an individual believer feels about the world. If we are asking the Islamic world to agree to our piffly Western view that all religions are pretty much the same, and ought to behave like it, then we ask too much of them.
The answer is not to privatize religious belief, but to recognize that while all religions can't be true, individual believers, by virtue of their dignity as human beings, have the right to believe as they wish -- and have the right to be wrong.
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CS,
It's my impression (hazy memory) that Jesuits are required to read the Torah in Hebrew. Not sure about that, but it would fit.
Nor am I meaning to cast aspersions on translations; I do mean to ask for caution. The original languages have not been living languages for many centuries, and to expect no mistakes in translating such documents is, well, not human. I've heard it said, not often, that the Holy Spirit guides the translators just as it guided the authors... which, to me, just shifts the question off into Neverland. Shrug.>
Given the lack of certainty of the Truth (or better yet, given the certainty that we cannot know the unvarnished Truth), why is there this insistence that "my religion is right so yours must be wrong" among most followers of the Book (whatever book that may be)?
I don't know if this is relevant or not, but every time I see the expression applied to Christians it makes me cringe: most Christians are not "followers of the Book". Specifically, Catholics and Orthodox are not. It's probably more correct to say that we are "followers of the Church". The Bible is folded into that, but is not the whole of it.>
David White,
No, I think that you should take Australia. It has lots of empty desert, I understand, where you and your co-religionists can wander around, listening to the revelations from the voices in your heads.
I will keep the parts of the globe that have deer, wild turkeys, and trout.
Phil>
Where translations are concerned, I'm voting to apply caution (and appreciation too, of course). There's simply no way to objectively, once-and-for-all nail down the meaning of a text in a foreign languge. Something is always lost in translation. A strict translation might be fairly accurate in a literal sense but lose a lot of the original's tones and shadings. A looser translation might suggest the poetry but lose the precision. And, in any case, you're reading something most of the time that is an emanation of a different culture, and often comes from a different time. So I think it generally makes sense to avoid saying, for example, "I've read Proust," if you've in fact read an English translation of Proust. Better to say "I've read Kilmartin's version of Proust." It might be something very like Proust. It might be magnificent in its own right. But it isn't, strictly speaking, Proust.>
FWIW, you guys are arguing for the need for an authoritative Church. That's why nobody knows what "real" Islam is: the only authority in Islam is a book.>
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