On the one hand, I’m sympathetic to some of the perennialists, at least to the extent that they see common themes in the various religions or try to find ways in which religions can work together or appreciate commonalitites. On the other hand, this is not the same as saying that all religions are somehow “really” the same.
I also notice that many of those who push the notion of “many roads to the same destination” seem never actually to follow any of said roads. I’m inclined to think that for many (not all) who espouse this view it’s a way to be be “spiritual” without making actual spiritual commitments.

Orthodox, institutional religions are quite different, but their mystics have much in common. A quote from the chapter “Mystic Viewpoints” in my e-book at http://www.suprarational.org on comparative mysticism:
Ritual and Symbols. The inner meanings of the scriptures, the spiritual teachings of the prophets and those personal searchings which can lead to divine union were often given lesser importance than outward rituals, symbolism and ceremony in many institutional religions. Observances, reading scriptures, prescribed acts, and following orthodox beliefs cannot replace your personal dedication, contemplation, activities, and direct experience. Preaching is too seldom teaching. For true mystics, every day is a holy day. Divine revelation is here and now, not limited to their sacred scriptures.
Conflicts in Conventional Religion. “What’s in a Word?” outlined some primary differences between religions and within each faith. The many divisions in large religions disagreed, sometimes bitterly. The succession of authority, interpretations of scriptures, doctrines, organization, terminology, and other disputes have often caused resentment. The customs, worship, practices, and behavior within the mainstream of religions frequently conflicted. Many leaders of any religion had only united when confronted by someone outside their faith, or by agnostics or atheists. Few mystics have believed divine oneness is exclusive to their religion or is restricted to any people.
Note: This is just a consensus to indicate some differences between the approaches of mystics and that of their institutional religion. These statements do not represent all schools of mysticism or every division of faith. Whether mystical experiences vary in their cultural context, or are similar for all true mystics, is less important than that they transform each one’s sense of being to a transpersonal outlook on all life.

I think the conversation with Athiests is a lot less interesting than the conversation between the 8 groups of believers Prothero talks about. It’s not athieism that’s responsible for war, genocide, terrorism, and destruction over the last 30 years, it’s Muslims, Christians, Jews, and Hindus (among others). Prothero’s int Christians.sights there are much more interesting than another dull conversation between orthodox Athiests and orthodox Christians.

The rituals and the origin stories are usually different, as are the interpretation of what some of the essential truths mean. Different denominations of different religions have different interpretations of what the same texts mean. The impact the various religions have on different cultures and vice versa are different. But despite that, I do see an essential core in many religions that looks similar to the teachings in very different religions. There’s each religion’s truth and then there’s Truth. I’d agree that there’s more commonalities among mystics in different religions — Sufis, Kabbalah, Christian mystics — than the more traditional adherents of religion.

Everytime I read or hear some people claim that there is no difference essentially between religions I like to tell them then there is no difference between Nazis, Jeffersonian Democrats, Communists, etc. they are all, after all, political parties. As for religion and killing–how quickly we forget the 10′s of millions of people killed by various types of atheists during the 20th Century in gulags, concentration camps, starvation campaigns (Stalin and the Ukraine).

I’d distinguish between the soft unifiers and the hard unifiers. The soft unifiers are sloppy; they substitute wishing for either facts or truths. The hard unifiers are not so sloppy; they are careful to distinguish between the level they are talking about. Clearly religions are not the same on the human level; and the God or gods they speak of are not the same on this level either. But Karen Armstrong and Frithjof Schuon are very different kinds of thinkers, and do not deserve to be sloppily tossed in the same bucket.
Turmarion: there are plenty of perennialists who follow a concrete and specific tradition: Muslims, Jews, Christians, and Buddhists; probably Hindus as well. Schuon often goes (went) so far as to say that one **must** follow such a particular tradition, the one to which one is chosen (not the one which one chooses); and that there is no *universal* tradition, only particulars. The *universal* truth exists at the level of the divine, not of the human. Or in Schuonian language, the universal exists on the level of pure intellect, not the level of particular and temporal being.

PDGM, the terms “soft” and “hard” unifiers are very good–that’s exactly what I had in mind, but didn’t express as well. I can respect the latter; it’s the former that are squishy and to whom I was referring. As you point out, and as I was aware, most of the perennialists eventually chose a specific path (Sufism was the commonest). I don’t think many of them actually became Hindu, but Hindu terminology and a modified version of the succession of yugas seems to have been common among them, even when they chose other religions. Anyway, I don’t think the perennialists were that far away from what Prothero says in terms of the human level, anyway, while admitting that on the Divine level things are different.

I agree that this notion of religions all being fundamentally the same is woefully misguided. The choice between religions is a real choice and it’s insulting to pretend that it is not. I personally have a great fascination with Mormonism, even though I am a non-believer myself, and that fascination is rooted in its distinctiveness.
I think two important reasons exist why people are apt to believe this in the first place, and each has some merit to it. First, striving for interfaith harmony is not some hippy, pie-in-the-sky distraction; it’s a laudable goal rooted in the fact that different religious believers have to share the same planet with each other and understand each other because they’re less likely to kill each other over religion that way. It’s easier to start dialog by emphasizing similarities rather than differences – the “difference denialists” are simply taking this noble impulse a bit too far.
Secondly, some important respects exist in which the various world religions are similar. They all tend to emphasize not murdering and stealing and having good will toward others. This is to be expected, as these sorts of values are the minimum needed for a functioning society. Dwelling on these similarities, however, can foster the illusion that similiarities mean sameness.

Re: The *universal* truth exists at the level of the divine, not of the human.
I’m not sure I quite get the distinction you’re trying to make. Christianity holds, for example, that the proposition ‘God is a Trinity’ holds on the divine level, not merely at the human level. It is a fundamental and unchangeable truth about the nature of God, and it would still be true even if human beings had never existed. To say that the Trinity is simply a way that we perceive God, instead of being the basic reality of God’s nature, is the error of Modalism. (Modalism seems to be one of the most common errors of our time, and you sometimes hear it even from well meaning liberal Episcopal priests.)
Therefore it’s not possible, say, for Islam, Christianity, and Hinduism all to be equally true. God cannot simultaneously be a Trinity and not be a Trinity, after all. I happen to think that plenty of other religions contain a certain measure of truth, but also that Christianity is the closest to the real truth of all the religions on the market, and that it’s simply logically incoherent to say that multiple religions which hold mutually exclusive things can all be of equal value.

This same general discussion keeps appearing on this site and the same general comments are made. What I say below will, I am sure, include points I’ve made before.
On a certain level, it’s pretty obvious that all religions are not the same: Christians are trinitarian; Muslims are radically monotheist; Buddhists are non-theist, and so on. For that matter, not all Christianity is the same, nor all Buddhism, etc. But I think Andrea is right that the mystics of various traditions, whom I would characterize as closer to the fundamentals of their respective traditions, seem to share a great deal, which, I suggest, is how a very conservative and exclusivist Catholic friend of mine very much liked a Sufi poem I sent her (though her liking may have changed when she found out that Sufis are Muslim).
This is why I find that I share something very real with those members of other religions who grasp the overwhelming reality of the divine and the relative unreality of our own egos, that I do not share with most members of my own, whose concept of reality does not extend beyond either a very literal understanding of doctrine or a sense of complacency and comfort in and with the world. What is shared is a sense that, as the 14th c. mystical Scale of Perfection says of God, “He is Thy Being, but thou art not his Being.” It was this that years ago, while still atheist, made my husband recognize that the various religions stand or fall together.
Part of the problem has to do with how we understand doctrine. We tend to accept it as a literal and exhaustive description of reality and forget that “any thought uttered is a lie,” to quote Fr. Schmemann (in his journals, quoting someone else).

Hector,
You might want to fine-tune your irony sensors before you go ranting about logical incoherence while using the Trinity as your doctrinal example. If the doctrine of the Trinity is to be accepted, then there aren’t actually logical grounds for asserting that God cannot simultaneously a Trinity and not a Trinity. The identity property has already been tossed out the window.

To me the question are they the same or not seems unimportant. The important question is which one is correct and how can you tell?

“… subjective theological desire about how things ought to be …”
such as there ought to be a loving God who relates daily to persons.
“… objective analytical fact about how things really are.”
such as there is no good solid evidence for the existence of God.

All religions are NOT the same
yes!
true!!
each religion has created different myths.
and most religions have invented a God unique to them.

“… a less emotional and less evangelistic atheism would garner far more influence.”
yes, and that is the actual type of most everyday non-famous atheists.
I’m sure most atheists have not read any books of the New Atheists.
the regular type non-published atheists are indeed greatly influencing the increase in percentage of the population who are not believers.
good point.

Grammatically, I believe that the correct formulation should be: Not All Religions Are the Same.

Pardon a cynical statement, but we wouldn’t be having this sort of discussion/debate/argument if the major religions didn’t have some variation on “Ours is the One True Way!”
Campbell et al provide a rebuttal to that, not a disproof. And the phrasing not used yet in this thread is the key one, for me: How can you deny that religions are at their core the same when they all stem from the human experience?
Quick set up, I encourage all to read the book Stardance by Spider and Jeanne Robinson (all of the following is paraphrased):
Aliens show up, and a small group of humans are clearly most likely to succeed in establishing communication with them. In transit to the meeting to discuss this, one of that group asks the ship’s captain “How could you assume that we would volunteer to go?” it being basically a one-way trip.
The captain expresses sincere astonishment. “You’re human.”

MMH, that’s exactly how I would describe it. Even the most orthodox of Catholics would not deny that there other religions have some measure of the truth. I don’t think God is possible for us to comprehend with our minds but I do think I can look at the concept of the deity with my intuition, the corner of my soul’s eye, and understand for a split second. Mystics and poets and artists and some of the saints are better at comprehending the incomprehensible and translating it for the rest of us.

James Cutsinger would be an example of a perennialist who belongs to a particular tradition (Orthodoxy). Some of his essays you can find online are pretty theologically rich.

Hector,
But not all religions claim to be speaking on the same level; and even within distinct religions, followers of these religions speak at different levels.
A concrete example of this: try reading “Christianity and the Doctrine of Non-Dualism” before being so very confident that, say, Christianity and Hinduism are utterly at odds. But this is a certain high level understanding of Christianity; as well as a certain high level understanding of Hinduism. It’s not at the level of Christianity as depicted in Italian holy cards, or of Hinduism depicted in equally bright (and to my eyes equally bad) religious art. Here, the Trinity can be presented as an old man, a young man, and a dove, or in some cases as yet a third man; this is from any real theological understanding absurd and heretical, and in fact goes against the canons of the Orthodox church in depicting the Trinity as opposed to depicting the incarnate divine Word.
These concrete examples are related to the fact that, as is pointed out above, mystical experience across religions has much in common; while doctrinal debate his little in common, at least at the level of bald confessional statements. Once one digs into these confessional statements, as did the Catholic monk who wrote the above book, unexpected things might come up. Perhaps higher level theology and mystical experience touch upon the same realities?
Is Christianity a monotheism? Yes. Does it also have the doctrine of the trinity? Yes. But the creeds generally begin with “I believe in one God.” And whatever Christianity means by Trinity, it does not mean an old man, a young man, and a dove: it does not mean three as in three coffee cups, or three peaches in a bowl.

The older I get the more convinced I become that the only accurate answer to which religion has the truth is “none of them.”
Now that does not mean that I, or those who hold this view, are necessarily atheist. It simply means that we do not choose to ascribe to any given established belief structure as they all contain so many elements of self-evident nonsense as part of their fundamentals.

PDGM,
My family is part Hindu, and I’m quite familiar with that faith- and I’d venture to suggest that the bright religious art probably is truer to the lived experience of most Hindus, then the philosophical musings of the aforementioned Ramakrishna. I’ll also say that I find a lot of value in the Hindu tradition I was raised in, but that what I find of value is precisely that which is particular- the myths, the stories, the ideas of God incarnating himself- not the insipid universalism.
It’s silly to suggest that all mystics agree with each other: not even all _Christian_ mystics agree with each other. Did Emmanuel Swedenborg, Julian of Norwich, St. John the Divine, and whoever wrote the ‘Apocalypse of Peter’ all have exactly the same views on the afterlife? Hardly.
As for what the Trinity is, here’s the best summary; it roundly refutes the commonly held (and to my mind, extremely irritating) error of modalism. To emphasize the unity of God at the expense of the distinctness of the Three Persons is at least as big an error as to emphasize the distinctness of the Three Persons at the expense of the unity of God.
“And the Catholic Faith is this:
That we worship one God in Trinity, and Trinity in Unity, neither confounding the Persons, nor dividing the Substance.
For there is one Person of the Father, another of the Son, and another of the Holy Ghost.
But the Godhead of the Father, of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost, is all one, the Glory equal, the Majesty co-eternal.
Such as the Father is, such is the Son, and such is the Holy Ghost.
The Father uncreate, the Son uncreate, and the Holy Ghost uncreate.
The Father incomprehensible, the Son incomprehensible,and the Holy Ghost incomprehensible.
The Father eternal, the Son eternal, and the Holy Ghost eternal.
And yet they are not three eternals, but one eternal.
As also there are not three incomprehensibles, nor three uncreated, but one uncreated, and one incomprehensible.
So likewise the Father is Almighty, the Son Almighty, and the Holy Ghost Almighty.
And yet they are not three Almighties, but one Almighty.
So the Father is God, the Son is God, and the Holy Ghost is God.
And yet they are not three Gods, but one God.
So likewise the Father is Lord, the Son Lord, and the Holy Ghost Lord.
And yet not three Lords, but one Lord.For like as we are compelled by the Christian verity to acknowledge every Person by himself to be both God and Lord,
So are we forbidden by the Catholic Religion, to say, here be three Gods, or three Lords.
The Father is made of none, neither created, nor begotten.
The Son is of the Father alone, not made, nor created, but begotten.
The Holy Ghost is of the Father and of the Son, neither made, nor created, nor begotten, but proceeding.
So there is one Father, not three Fathers; one Son, not three Sons; one Holy Ghost, not three Holy Ghosts.
And in this Trinity none is afore, or after other; none is greater, or less than another;
But the whole three Persons are co-eternal together and co-equal.
So that in all things, as is aforesaid, the Unity in Trinity and the Trinity in Unity is to be worshipped.”

Charles Cosimano “… the only accurate answer to which religion has the truth is ‘none of them’”.
most certainly true.
IF there is a God, it’s obvious that It surely is not equal to any of the versions invented by the imaginations of the founder(s) of any of the numerous religions.

but why does any faith doctrine have to triumph over any other?
i’ve never heard a satisfying answer to that.
in the temporal world, there is competition for finite tangible things like land and resources. but what of the spiritual world?
if 4 people hold to 4 different spiritual views, so what? and i don’t mean that flippantly. really, what is the negative end result that would matter to you or i? if you believe that the other persons soul is lost, really, what does that have to do with you?
people have this mistaken notion that the key to religious harmony is to create some kind of universal feel-good sameness, or spiritual oneness. but why? what about the idea of strengthening, and living by, one’s own personal relationship with their maker as they see fit, and just letting the other guy do the same. no matter how different their practice is from your own?
i don’t think i’ve ever heard a clear and even answer to what seems like a pretty basic question about why we can’t strive to live together in peace while having widely divergent personal religious beliefs from one another.

Hector, I don’t necessarily subscribe to all aspects of Perennialism, and I do think that at some point you have to say that religions do differ in real ways that can’t be reconciled. Still, I do think it’s not completely unintelligible to say that the “universal truth exists at the level of the divine, not of the human.”
Consider the following: A monotheist (Christian, Jew, Muslim, Zoroastrian, or Sikh) would say that the ultimate Divine reality behind the cosmos must be transcendent (which means it’s not a crudely anthropomorphic Greek-type god) and simple (since you can’t logically have multiple Ultimate Principles). Thus, God is one. The monotheist is right.
A polytheist would say that the Divine has been experienced in vastly different ways by humanity over history and that there must be some legitimacy to these experiences. Even Jews and Christians acknowledge some action by God among all people. Further, a philosophical case could be made that if God were purely simple, One with no differentiation, that He could not love (since love implies subject and object–and before the cosmos is created, a totally simple God would be pure subject with no object). One could in fact argue that a totally simple God with no subject/object differentiation wouldn’t even know Himself (since one has to “step back” and be able to partially objectify oneself–to be in short subject and object at once–in order to have self awareness), let alone be able to make a differentiated cosmos! Thus it seems that when the polytheist says that God is many, he is in some sense right, too.
A Trinitarian Christian combines both of these insights. He insists on God’s unity of essence or substance (the “what”), but also on the plurality, the Trinity, in fact, of Persons (the “who”). Three is the minimum needed for true self-awareness: amator, amatus, et amor mutuus (“lover, beloved, and mutual love [itself]“), in St. Augustine’s formulation. A Jew or Muslim would argue (wrongly, in my judgment) that this is a cover for tri-theism; and a polytheist would say that the unity didn’t make sense; but to a Christian, the Trinity honors the human perceptions both of unity and multiplicity in God and thus unites the seeming opposites. Thus, the Trinitarian is right, too.
Finally, we note that Eastern Orthodoxy has always firmly declared that while we can know God’s “energies” (what He does) we can never know his essence (what He is). We can only use apophatic theology to say what He’s not. St. John of the Cross concurs, saying that God is nada, “nothing”. Not that He doesn’t exist–rather He is “no thing”. That is, He is not one thing among many, nothing like anything in the Universe or even the Universe taken as a whole. This, btw, is the problem with atheism: it doesn’t get the analogy of being and thinks that since God doesn’t exist as we do, He doesn’t exist at all. The limping analogy is that the dreamer is not a thing in his own dream–even if he’s in his own dream, the “dream self” is still a separate thing, not the dreamer at all. To put it in terms of Thomistic theology, no property of God, not even His existence, can be posited univocally (that is, in an identical sense) of God and any creature. Thus, it is quite true to say that God does not, in fact, exist, in any sense of the word “exist” that applies to us. In this sense, the non-theistic Buddhist or even the atheist, is right, too–God does not exist, in a sense
Thus, on a human level of understanding, it would be accurate to say, in a certain sense, that God is many; that He’s one; that He’s three; or that He’s none. What is actually true of Him can’t even begin to be described in human language or even thought. In this sense, I think you can say that the universal truth is indeed fully present at the Divine level, not at the human level. On the other hand, this doesn’t mean that no distinctions are useful or that we can’t prefer some religions to others. For an extreme example, while the Aztecs must have had some experience of God, I think it was somehow highly defective, in that it involved human sacrifice. Without going into details I don’t have space for, I think one can likewise make an argument that Christianity has the fullest grasp of the truth about God, insofar as we humans can talk about such truth in human terms; which is why I’m Christian. But, given the former discussion, I’m ready to concede a lot more (relative) truth and experience of the Divine to non-Christian religions than many monotheists would be willing to do.
In that sense, Hector, I find that Greek mythology speaks to me in a deep way, polytheism and all, perhaps in a way similar to that in which Hindu myth appeals on some level to you. I think they (and as I’ve said in past posts, J. R. R. Tolkien’s mythos) are “true” in a deep sense; but that doesn’t mean I think the Pantheon is actually gazing down from Olympus, that Ganesha got a new elephant head after losing his old one by accident, or that archeology will someday find evidence for the Shire!
In this respect, I think the tongue-in-cheek Discordian reformulation of the Jain concept of saptabhanginaya can actually be taken seriously: “All affirmations are true in some sense, false in some sense, meaningless in some sense, true and false in some sense, true and meaningless in some sense, false and meaningless in some sense, and true and false and meaningless in some sense.”
MMH and PDGM at 12:22 AM, I’d be in broad agreement with your posts.
MH: The important question is which one is correct and how can you tell?
My full answer to that would be book-length or a daylong conversation (probably with lots of wine and cheese!), but a few quick broad guidelines:
It’s not right if: 1. It irreconcilably conflicts with known facts about the world (e.g. young–Earth-creationism, which insists against uniform evidence that the world is 6000 years old). 2. It involves human sacrifice (’nuff said there!). 3. You have to pay to join, participate, or move up (e.g. Scientology). That’s not much for now, but it’s a start.
Charles, it seems you’re talking more about organizations and dogmas of the “this is how you’re supposed to live your life” variety than of metaphysics. As to “self-evident nonsense”; well, it’s self-evidently nonsensical to say that light is a particle and a wave at the same time, and yet that is standard quantum theory. Plenty of other mainstays of modern physics are equally absurd. In this sense, there is an affinity between true mysticism (which is not the same as obfuscation!) and modern physics in that both recognize that truth, when expressed in limited human language, often comes out sounding contradictory, absurd, “nonsensical”; but in and of itself, that doesn’t make it any less the truth.

Hector,
You keep on accusing me of modalism; you fail to show a single instance of anything I’ve said that is modalist. It’s become a club to beat me with; and it’s a crude tool, as most clubs are. It’s also probably inaccurate.
Yes, most Hindu’s version of Hinduism is the “Asian Holy Card” style; as is much Christianity the corresponding version of Christian art. This does not address the truth claims of a Ramakrishna, or “the Monk of the West” who wrote the book I recommend you read. Just because this is true suggests nothing about the possibility of some higher understanding.
But even Aquinas on God’s simplicity raises issues with what you seem to think of as the trinity; whatever it is, it’s not “three” in the sense that three individual physical objects are three. You fail to address this completely, again retreating behind credal formulations. I know those formulations as well as you do; but I also know that there are people who have tried to understand religious commonalities in some rigorous way, which basically you seem to find threatening and thus are anxious to debunk in any way possible, hence the club of modalism.
The one valid claim you make is about the variety of mystical experience; but I was basing what I said on MMH’s reporting of a conservative Catholic responding to a Sufi poem, which I think is not uncommon. There are different forms of mysticism; the experiences are always filtered through an individual acculturated consciousness; so even an Orthodox hesychast monk or nun and a Spanish Catholic religious will have different experiences. I’m not denying that; I am claiming that there are commonalities, and the “higher” one goes in understanding and experience, the greater these commonalities are. They don’t ever completely make irrelevant the human and individuated side though.
Regards, and please, stop hitting me with what to me feels like a one-size-fits-all club,
PDGM

PDGM, learn bounce. It’s like balance, but with different letters.
So far, the elephant in the room has the objective but unknowable “who”, and the subjective and nigh-impossible to share, let alone agree upon experience of “what”.
Is there another reader of American Gods by Neil Gaiman in the house?

I suggest we play a little game. First, I will name some ways in which all religions seem the same to me.
In monotheistic systems, God is male. God is not female. Male pronouns are used to refer to God. When there are multiple deities, the Supreme Deity is always male.
God is characterized as a master, ruler, boss, patriarch, and absolute monarch. God owns everything, but he still likes people to give him things, or “sacrifice.”
God requires absolute submission. God proactively punishes lack of submission with various torments.
God considers men and women differently. God gives authority to speak for him to men, but not to women. God gives men authority over women. God’s plan for women involves submitting to men, having their sexuality controlled by men, and bearing children who, by God’s decree, belong to their fathers. God never places women in authority over men.
God places regulations on what people are allowed to eat and drink, what they can wear, what they are allowed to read or look at, and how they can have sex. God never tells people it’s okay to follow their own preferences in these areas.
God discourages people from trusting the evidence of their own senses, their own thoughts or feelings. He expects them to trust, instead, in what they are told by the men he has placed in authority over them.
God doesn’t accept the blame for anything bad that happens. God expects people to call whatever he does good, even when it feels bad to them. God sees all, knows all, plans all, but is not responsible for bad things happening. God willfully inflicts suffering on people, but requires them to speak of him as if he is always perfectly good and kind. God often seems not to make sense, but requires that people speak of him as if he makes perfect sense.
God considers some people better than others, and encourages believers to help him punish those who are less worthy. He gives people a free pass to kill, provided they kill people who don’t believe in the right version of him.
God is always portrayed with the same sex and ethnic features as the dominant authorities of the region.
Okay, now it’s your turn. Tell me some ways in which religions are radically different from each other. If you can tell me of a religion that contradicts all, or even most, of the above standards of belief, then I for one will welcome my new Superduperuberoverlord.

“[God is a Trinity] is a fundamental and unchangeable truth about the nature of God, and it would still be true even if human beings had never existed. ”
Actually, would it? Part of the Trinity is the Son, created specifically as a response to human sin. If humans had never existed there would be no Jesus, since his entire purpose was to die for our sins.
And yes, obviously to the individual practicioners, their religion is unique and different in many ways, some subtle, from other religions. But from an outside, objective view there are enough similarities between all religions that a convincing case can be made for them all being inventions of human imagination.

Re: Part of the Trinity is the Son, created specifically as a response to human sin.
Not true. The Word became incarnate as a human being in response to human sin, but the Word has always existed as a distinct Person of God, and was never ‘created’. What you’re espousing is Arianism.
The Apostle John tells us “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the word was God. He was in the beginning with God; all things were made through him, and nothing made was made without him.” And the Nicene Creed tells us that the Word is “the only Son of God, begotten of the Father before all ages; God of God, Light of Light, Very God of Very God; begotten not made, of one substance with the Father…..”
In short, there was never a time when the Word was not, and there was never a time when God was not a Trinity.

Re: Re: The *universal* truth exists at the level of the divine, not of the human.
I’m not sure I quite get the distinction you’re trying to make.
Hector, as I read this, it’s a comment on the fact that we finite and flawed humans have only a limited ability to apprehend an infinite, perfect God– and our languages also cannot possibility capture the entirety of the divine Truth. As another poster pointed out we can know what God does when he acts in time, but knowing what God is outside of time is closed to us.
I sometimes think of human religions as planets orbiting a star: some orbit a lot closer than others (you can guess which one I think has the inner orbit), but all are captured by the same gravity well, and bask in the same light, though a few orbit far out in the Oort cloud only dimly illumined.

Sigilaris,
I respectfully suggest you read Anthony Bloom’s older book “God and Man” for a view of the Christian religion that is completely at odds with what you present as being the “obvious” commonality. The author, until his death, was a Russian Orthodox bishop.
To tar all Christians with your particular brush is like tarring all atheists with the P. Z. Myers brush.
PDGM

Franklin Evans June 7, 2010 11:34 PM
Pardon a cynical statement, but we wouldn’t be having this sort of discussion/debate/argument if the major religions didn’t have some variation on “Ours is the One True Way!”
CAP June 8, 2010 1:16 AM
but why does any faith doctrine have to triumph over any other?
i’ve never heard a satisfying answer to that.
Each religion has the quasi-necessity of declaring itself the one true way in precisely the same way that each individual thinks of him or herself as “I”. I am I; you are–in one respect, i.e., to me–not I. And vice versa. To the extent that a subjectivity is limited, it necessarily excludes others, and this hold true not only of our sense of individual self but also of the religion to which we belong. I am Christian; I accept that Jesus is the Son of God, which means that I do not accept the Muslim understanding of him as merely a prophet. *As a Christian* I can accept the first part of the Shahadah, “There is no God but God” but not the second, “And Muhammad is his prophet”. What each of us can do with regard to each other is recognize that each is, in his or her own right, also “I”, just not my “I”, if that makes any sense. It seems that we should also bring this understanding to bear on our attitude to other religions.

PDGM, I acknowledge that your reference to Bloom’s work was kindly meant and respectfully made. Unfortunately, I don’t find it completely helpful. Rather than summarizing with “I have a book that proves you’re wrong!” it would be more useful to cite some statements made in the book that contradict what I’ve said. I have to remind people frequently, it seems, that I was, for over fifty years, a devout and diligently practicing Catholic. When I speak of other religions, I’m speaking as an observer, but when I speak about Christianity, I’m speaking my own native language.
To use Bloom as a counter-example, I think you would have to show two things:
1) Give examples of Bloom’s specifically contradicting my standards above, and
2) Show that his views were warmly received and incorporated into the mainstream teaching and practice of his church.
It’s not enough to say that there may be individual Christians who think differently. That has always been the case. Hans Kung and Teilhard de Chardin are two who come to mind. They were not warmly received, however. They were suspected, investigated, and marginalized. That has, in general, been the fate of people who critiqued the official world religion as I stated it. Sometimes they get lucky and are merely ignored.
The fact that Bloom was a Russian Orthodox bishop does not prove very much, to my way of thinking. If anything, it shows that he was not that far from the standard teaching. As a bishop, he couldn’t help but support the official rules of religion in almost everything he did. He wore special clothes, received special treatment, was considered one of those men given authority by God, accepted the submission of other humans to God by way of himself, etc. etc.

Re: When there are multiple deities, the Supreme Deity is always male.
Sigaliris, a counter-example: In Japanese Shinto myth, the head honcho-ette of Heaven is Amaterasu-o-mi-kami, the Sun Goddess. There’s a myth about her being really cheesed off at her obnoxious brother the storm god, and she went away to live in a cave, so that the Earth basically froze (a distant echo of the Demeter-Persephone myth, albeit with a different story?) The other gods lacked the power to force her out, so they tricked her instead and then dazzled her eyes with her own brilliance in a mirror so they could seize her person and restore her to heaven. At a shrine in Ise the priests claim to keep that mirror and other artifacts and the Emperor goes there once a year to propitiate his ancestress in Shinto’s most sacred rites.

As a p.s., I think Franklin’s comment bears repeating:
How can you deny that religions are at their core the same when they all stem from the human experience?
And btw, I’ve read and enjoyed Stardance and its sequels. Be assured that if God came to me as a crimson symbiote from outer space, I would embrace Him/Her/It with open arms. ; )

Franklin, if no one else is giving you a witness here, I will. American Gods is a great book. And creeepy! That damn leprauchany guy bringing blessings and death has given me nightmares for some years now.
I’m a Christian, and you’re a pagan, and I comment little here anymore. But I still love you and Roland de Chanson. And Rod.
truly catholic ™

“Just because religious hotheads have killed and sometimes do kill in the name of religion and religious difference, and de-emphasizing religious difference stands to reduce incidences of religiously-motivated violence, does not make the universalist arguments true. Prothero argues that we’re never going to have real peace among the world’s religious if we gloss over true diversity of belief in favor of a bland universalism that denies deep differences. He also says that New Atheism is more of a media phenomenon in the West than a viewpoint that has a chance of winning hearts and minds globally. The hysterical hatred of religion espoused by the better-known New Atheists actually hurts their cause, Prothero asserts: “I feel quite certain that a less emotional and less evangelistic atheism would garner far more influence.”
That seems right to me.”
Well it would, wouldn’t it? It seems quite UN-’right’ to me, because it isn’t a matter of “de-emphasizing religious difference [which] stands to reduce incidences of religiously-motivated violence”. Those religious differences will remain whether ‘emphasized’ or ‘de-emphasized’. The non-/a-religious are afraid of the ‘religious’ insisting that their tenets be put into laws governing all people, even those who are not members of any particular religion. This is NOT a “hysterical hatred of religion”; it is a very reasonable reaction. It is precisely when those ‘religious beliefs’ are put into such laws that the violence occurs.
cf. http://www.365gay.com/blog/060410-family-research-council-supports-death/
“The Family Research Council is a sponsor of murder. That is not Friday morning hyperbole. Joe, at Joe.My.God, found out FRC walked the halls of Congress fighting a resolution that denounced Uganda’s proposal to legally lynch gays. Two lobbyists were paid $25,000 to lobby the Senate and the House. Apparently their work wasn’t successful in the Senate because that body passed its resolution on April 13. However, it “remains languishing in the House almost four months after being referred to the Foreign Affairs Committee.”
This is a very real threat to the actual, real lives of real people and it is sponsored by a self-identified “Christian” group.
“Ugandan MP David Bahati said he had private support from American evangelicals.” (That would be the “F”"R”C.)
Nor is this a “favor[ing] of a bland universalism that denies deep differences”. Those differences will continue to exist – even I acknowledge that. It is being forced to live one’s lives in a manner that betrays one’s own beliefs – because of those differences – that causes very real harm/violence.
“[W]e’re never going to have real peace among the world’s religious if we gloss over true diversity of belief” …
Frankly, I’m not convinced that “real peace among the world’s religious” is even a common goal among North American “Christian” evangelicals. Sounds to me it’s more like ‘Our way or the highway”. (And we haven’tt even begon to actually address some of the heinous ‘tenets’ of the likes of the Westboro Baptists, the “F” “R” C, Let’s Focus on SOME People’s Families, Richard Land, Pat Robertson, et al.)
When North American “Christians” can keep their tenets to themselves, I will begin to believe you, Rod.

Let me agree with CAP’s statement”
“but why does any faith doctrine have to triumph over any other?
Consider this: apart from Sigaliris’s succinct delineation of the ‘commonalities’ shared by the world’s major religions – and I agree – there is also this that they have in common – the ‘do unto others as you would have them do unto you’ dictum. Christ says it is the “sum of the laws and the prophets”
This is no “bland universalism”; it is the heart and soul of what it means to be a moral person (aka an actual “Christian” in Christian-speak, or a “religious”, as Rod would have it).

Frankly, I can’t wait for Rod to address Rush Limbaugh’s (fourth!) marriage.
Can one have four marriages and still say one is a defender of “traditional” (aka heterosexual, 1 man, 1 woman-at-a-time, ‘for life’) marriage?
What religion sanctions this tenet?
[Note from Rod: If you're waiting for me to defend Rush Limbaugh on anything, much less his private life, you've clearly not been reading this blog long enough. I hope Mr. Limbaugh gets it right this time. Beyond that, I don't have anything else to say about him. -- RD]

Rod, I’ll hope you’ll consider posting a full review of Prothero’s book when you finish it. I read it last week (sitting on the floor of a Borders that has, for some reason, removed all its chairs). I found Prothero’s writing style to be a little too casual, a little too wannabe hip – enough so that I noticed and was slightly annoyed by it. But I finished the book feeling like I had eaten a very substantive meal. And I’m strongly in sympathy with the overall message of the book – it’s a much needed corrective.
A second criticism: I found the inclusion of the Yoruba somewhat at odds with the book’s subtitle (“the eight rival religions that run the world”). I get what Prothero was trying to do (namely, avoid a bland and overgeneralized chapter on “primitive religions”). But I’m not sure it worked. It’s a little bizarre to offer a religious survey of the human species that excludes Sikhs and Bahais (and many others) but includes the Yoruba…

Shorter sigaliris:
“Either God is just like me or He doesn’t exist.”

The New Atheists don’t want to be your friend. That’s the point, they see themselves representing people who are tired of explaining that ‘atheist’ doesn’t mean nihilist. So, they’ve decided, they’ll call you whatever names they’ve had shouted at them, only louder, as if that will prove who really is the nihilist.
But this is where we are. For example, anyone who believes that natural laws invoke final causes and not only efficient ones are not modern atheists. And by ‘modern’, I mean since the early-modern period defined by Descartes’ and Galileo’s casting-out of final causes from the physical world. So, Nazis, Marxists, and Rand-style Objectivists, all of whom crudely reintroduced final causes back into the natural world, are not modern atheists. (According to them the goal of evolution/history/economics is to produce a master race/a master working class/a meritocracy. According to moderns, only rational beings have wills and purposes. That’s definitive of modernity.)
Even an atheist like me can distinguish how crude projections of a person’s self-inflated identity onto the world differs from a legitimate religious tradition. But it’s pretty irritating to make that argument again and again, while the willfully ignorant, like Bresnahan above, insist on conflating atheists with Nazis and Stalin. And so I see the appeal, while resisting the temptation, to return the slander. So, instead, I’ll reiterate, for the millionth time, that atheists do not worship a race, a socioeconomic class, or the rugged individual.
And this is also the value of Armstrong’s work. By attempting to find a common kernel to religions (and varieties of atheism), she distinguishes the meaningful from the crude. She shows, quite convincingly, how enlightenment deism is similar to atomistic atheism (both bankrupt), and how monistic mysticism is more similar to Spinoza’s atheism than either is to deism. That’s interesting, healing stuff. It helps show a way forward for everyone, and saying that it glosses over real differences, it seems to me, is true but misses the point.

If Judaism deserves a place in Prothero’s book, then so does Yoruba religion. It is ancestral to Macumba, Candomble, Santeria, Voodoo and a half-dozen other South and Central American traditions that have yet to attract much academic interest.
You might not like those traditions, but collectively there’s rather a lot of people who do.
[Note from Rod: There is a chapter in the book devoted to Yoruba. -- RD]

Do we really read Armstrong, Smith or Campbell to mean that all religions are the same? That’s not at all how I’ve read any of their work.
An understanding of how human beings process mythic truths and religious revelation does not mean that all myths are created equal, or that all religious revelation is true. We all breath the same way, and breathing is necessary for survival, but not all air is good for us as with smoke-filled rooms, gas-filled mines or exhaust-filled garages.

Re: how monistic mysticism is more similar to Spinoza’s atheism than either is to deism.
Spinoza is usually presented as a pantheist (notably by Bertrand Russell, who had no reason to whitewash anyone’s atheism). Are you sure you’re not trying to recruit the guy to your cause the way some “Christian Nation” folk recruit the Founding Fathers to “Bible-believing” Christianity?
Or is pantheism to count as atheism in your system because it denies a personal god?

I am not altogether au courant with the similarities and differences of the various religions. But as nearly as I can make out, there seems to be a major dichotomy centered upon their god’s relative fixation on the male foreskin. The sociological ascends to the theological. And the flesh became word.
Populus vult decipi.

Jon -
Well, either way. The concept of God in Spinoza is invoked to explain the activity in mind and matter. But, apart from purpose attributed to actual minds (i.e. individual rational beings), there’s no *purposeful* activity attributed to the world as a whole. He seems to limit that to the minds as organisms. So, I don’t think it fits the contemporary usage of ‘God’.
d

Re: You keep on accusing me of modalism; you fail to show a single instance of anything I’ve said that is modalist.
PDGM,
I’m not accusing _you_ of being a modalist, I’m saying a great portion of modern western society is functionally Modalist. If the shoe doesn’t fit you, then don’t wear it.
I will say that anyone who says ‘Trinitarianism is the way we perceive / experience God’ instead of ‘Trinitarianism is the way God IS, and has always been and will always be’, is embracing Modalism.
And you’re simply assuming that Ramakrishna’s understanding of Hinduism is more true then a millet farmer in Tanjore, and presumably that, say, the unspeakable Karen Armstrong’s understanding of Christianity is more true then that of a cassava farmer in Brazil. Why assume that? Never mind that you’re undercutting your own argument, which is that all religious viewpoints are equal.
Re: I also know that there are people who have tried to understand religious commonalities in some rigorous way, which basically you seem to find threatening and thus are anxious to debunk in any way possible
I do find it threatening. I was raised in a partly Hindu milieu, and heard this business about all religions being the same all the time when I was growing up. I came to perceive it wasn’t true, and that’s why I converted to Christianity. It’s true that Hinduism and Christianity are striving for similar things and addressing similar human needs, and that both of them contain some truth, but I believe that Christianity contains more truth then Hinduism. And I fear and mistrust the efforts of those who would elide the differences between religions and boil them all down into some sort of insipid, formless tapioca pudding.
Sigaliris,
I can’t say I agree with everything that the last two thousand years worth of popes, patriarchs, synods, and ecumenical councils have said, and in fact I disagree with quite a lot of it, but when I compare their version of Christianity with the one that you and your ideological comrades would create if you had been running things (lots of singing Kum-Ba-Yah and John Lennon’s ‘Imagine’, blessing the sacrament of abortion, and babblings about following your bliss, I don’t doubt) then I’m glad that Jesus Christ delegated his church to them, and not to you.

Hector, I’m going to cut you some slack and consider your response just very silly, rather than a mean-spirited case of false witness for which you ought to repent if you were really seeking to improve your soul. To get back to the point, do you think that any of my stipulations about religion are actually untrue? You have experience of both Hinduism and Christianity. In what ways do those two religions disagree about the points I made? Is there in fact a significant difference between them in those areas? If so, what is it? Can you point to a religion that doesn’t exhibit any of those characteristics? If you can, why not do so? That would be a more effective rebuttal. If you can’t, then why be angry with me for stating the obvious? But, on second thought, please don’t rein in your temper in any way. Please continue to make my point for me. ; )

Hector,
I think if the hymn at the center of the new gospel of Sigalirisity isn’t “Imagine,” but another British-rock golden oldie from the 1960′s: “Sympathy for the Devil.”

the stupid Chris: Do we really read Armstrong, Smith or Campbell to mean that all religions are the same? That’s not at all how I’ve read any of their work.
I’ve read all of them, and this is my (only partially tongue-in-cheek) take:
Shorter Armstrong: All religions are the same in their nice bits; the only place they differ is in all the nasty places.
Shorter Campbell: The inner essence of all religions is Hinduism.
Now Smith is a perennialist, and a subtle and nuanced one. He does yoga and a form of Islamic salah (ritual prayer) but remains within the Methodist tradition of his youth (as the child of missionaries in China!). He is frank in saying that popular religion (regardless of which religion it is) is not the same as the “higher” or “dogmatic” or “philosophical” religion, and that, at least in the temporal sense, there are real and intractable differences among religions. He has said that if he were starting as a “blank slate” he might be Hindu or some other faith; but that given his personal history and inculturation, the only religion he could fully follow is Christianity.
Thus I guess you could say a shorter Smith is, “All religions are more or less the same from the Divine perspective, but not really for us, and it’s probably better to stay within the faith tradition of your upbringing, if you can.” With which I’d tend more or less to agree.
Hector: I will say that anyone who says ‘Trinitarianism is the way we perceive / experience God’ instead of ‘Trinitarianism is the way God IS, and has always been and will always be’, is embracing Modalism.
I think that for what PDGM calls a “soft unifier”, this is pretty much true. However, remember the story about St. Augustine: He was walking along the beach and saw a little boy scooping water from the sea with a shell. He asked the boy what he was doing, and the answer was, “Emptying the ocean.” Augustine laughed and told the boy he’d never manage to do it like that, to which the child responded, “I’ll empty the ocean with a seashell sooner than you’ll understand the Trinity!” So, I think one could say “Trinitarianism is the way we perceive God” could mean something like “God is one in essence and three in Persons, but how that can be or what that can actually mean in the deepest sense is totally beyond me!” FWIW, I do believe that Trinitarianism is an ontological statement about God, not just what we “experience” Him as; but on the other hand, I think that some Christians (not you–I’m talking broadly) think it gives them more of a handle on the Divine Essence than they (or anyone, for that matter) actually have.
On the other hand, I tend to agree with you that it’s a classist fallacy to say that a peasant believer has an inferior understanding of his or her faith than an intellectual or theologian. As someone (I forget who) once pointed out, all the major heresies were begun not by the laity but by bishops and theologians!
CAPTCHA: rivalry James Well, “James” comes from “Jacob”, from Ya`aqôbh, “supplanter” or “wrestler”; and Jacob and Esau were rivals; so I guess that’s creepily (and Scripturally) true….

Re: So, I don’t think it fits the contemporary usage of ‘God’.
Well, it doesn’t fit the Judeo-Christian concept of God, that I’ll grant you, but I wouldn’t fling around the term “atheist” to describe everyone who isn’t on board with that.
On a related topic, it’s rather obscure to me why atheism requires the rejection of final causes. You can have a natural entelechy and still not believe in an external God. Moreover it’s time and past time to admit that Time does indeed have directionality, and should probably be treated as an operator not a mere parameter. Nature has been screaming this at us from phenomena small (particle CP violation) to large (the expansion of the whole universe). That doesn’t mean going back to the silliness of the scholastics who put humankind front and center and saw moral homilies pertaining to us in everything in nature. But one reason modern science seems to have stalled is because it’s locked down now by it own methodological and metaphysical assumptions.

Jon:
> but I wouldn’t fling around the term “atheist” to describe everyone
> who isn’t on board with that.
Fair enough. But I did use ‘modern’ in the technical sense (post Descartes-Galileo). So, I pretty clearly indicated that I’m thinking within a western tradition.
> You can have a natural entelechy and still not believe in an
> external God.
Sure. That’s why I noted crude religions like Objectivism, Nazism, and Marxism. Those can be classified as atheistic creeds. But doing so stretches the usage in order to impugn the characters of more ordinary atheists. As bigots like Bresnehan, above, commonly do. So let’s not pretend that this is all about exploring the space of logical possibilities.
Are non-crude atheistic natural teleologies possible? Why not? I’m not sure I can make sense of teleology without an organizing intelligence. I’ve thought about it a lot. But I don’t have a good argument against the idea, and I am not surprised that I don’t. After all, Kant’s argument that the only source of real value is a good will isn’t a knock-down argument. That’s the kind of argument I’d need, and if I had it, I’d have my own blog and book tour.
It does seem to me that atheistic natural teleolgies are (but not necessarily) dangerous. After all, if there’s no God demanding humility, what’s to stop one from violently projecting one’s own desires on the world? Reflections on Objectivism, Marxism, Nazism bears this out.
On the other hand, I don’t see why temporal or matter/anti-matter asymmetries cry out for teleological explanations.

If Judaism deserves a place in Prothero’s book, then so does Yoruba religion. It is ancestral to Macumba, Candomble, Santeria, Voodoo and a half-dozen other South and Central American traditions that have yet to attract much academic interest.
You might not like those traditions, but collectively there’s rather a lot of people who do.
Clasqm, I don’t “not like” those traditions. I may not know much about them, but I certainly don’t dislike them. Rather, I find it problematic to use the Yoruba religion as a stand-in, either for “indigenous religions” as a whole, or for Yoruba-religion-cum-its-New-World-descendants. Why not just write a good, if unavoidably general chapter on West African religions and their New World affiliates, rather than Yoruba religion alone? That would certainly be more in keeping with the book’s subtitle.

Of course all religions are not the same, and NONE of them are about The Living Divine Reality.
They are all projections of the collective tribalistic ego. Or put in another way they are all power seeking cults.
This is especially true of the two world dominant semitic religions, namely Christianity and Islam. Both of these religions claim to possess the one true faith/way/revelation, and that they have a “Divine” mandate of great commission to convert every one to their one “true way”. As such they are both would be world conquering political religions.
Such a one-true-way attitude is effectively a declaration of war against all other faith traditions and their various cultural expressions. Historically these two political religions have used what ever means they could to achieve their would be world conquest(s).
As such these two power seeking religions are perpetually at war with each other and are now in 2010, engaged in a deadly power struggle for global essentially totalitarian “ruler-ship”.