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CHAPTER 13
Religious Diversity and Truth
IHOPE THIS BOOK has answered many of your questions about different reli gious beliefs and practices. But I am sure it has left you (I know it has left me) with even more questions. Some of these may have to do with religious conflict and rivalry. Some questions may concern how the various religions might be related. Other questions may have to do with religious truth. We need to pay attention to what Mark Twain half humorously and half seriously said in Letters from Earth: "Man is the only animal that has a True Religion—several of them." People who study comparative religions experience what some have called "the shock of recognition."' They discover similarities between their own religion and other religions. It seems that in some seise religions are not all that different. We recognize ourselves in what otbers believe and do. So are all religions equally effective paths to salvation? Recognition of similarities is often accompanied by "the shock of differ-ence."' There is no denying religious diversity. After our initiation into the academic study of religion, we can see that the often-repeated judgment that "all religions are the same" is too superficial given the evidence. Also, it is not fair to others or to ourselves to pronounce all religions the same and to act as if religious differences were not real differences or not very important. What are we to make of this situation? Can all religions be true if real differences separate them?
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In this concluding chapter, we will tackle some of these questions. We will explore some of the reasons for religious conflict and competition. We will examine some of the many ways we have been socialized to think about the relationships among religions, and we will examine the question of religious truth. We will also return to the topic of religious tolerance introduced in the first chapter. And we will extend our abilities to understand and interpret reli-gion by looking at the case of a relatively recent religious development called Baha'i. Baha'i advocates religious harmony and peace. What compels it to do so? Why does this message arise at this time in history?
13.1 WHY CAN'T WE ALL GET ALONG?
Rodney King asked the above question with respect to race relations, and we can ask it with respect to the relationships among and within religions. Why have religious wars been fought? Why have tens of millions of people been slaughtered in the name of some god? Why does such religiously inspired carnage continue? Religious conflict is caused by many factors, including nationalistic expan-sionism, economic inequities, political instability, and long-standing ethnic hatred and prejudice. However, there is no denying that religious beliefs and prejudices have played and continue to play a major role in human conflict. There is the Palestinian and Israeli conflict in the eastern Mediterranean, where, although not all Palestinians are Muslim and not all Israelis are devoted Jews, religious factors are involved. In the former Yugoslavia, the Christian (Eastern Orthodox) Serbs have murdered their Muslim neighbors under the banner of "ethnic cleansing." We can grant that the political ambitions of Slo-bodan Milosevic were a key factor in this conflict, but that does not mean that religious tensions did not contribute to the sickening slaughter. The Nazis were far from Christian in their ideology, but most of gentile Germany was either Catholic or Protestant, and in spite of Jesus's admonition to love your neighbor, many of them proceeded to cooperate in and support the mass extermination of Jews. Now various groups seek to cloak their terrorism in terms of a Muslim/Judeo-Christian holy war. A sociological theory, called conflict theory, postulates that conflict arises in cases of power differences. In other words, conflict between and within groups amounts to a struggle for power, wealth, prestige, and privilege. Religions are in competition. The more religions there are, and the more religions are forced by historical, political, economic, and geographic factors to interact, the more likely it is, according to conflict theory, that they will fight (often violently and viciously) over power, wealth, prestige, and privilege. Conflict arises out of other sources besides the competition for power and influence. Conflict often stems from a sense of threat. The Peace of Westphalia in 1648 brought to a close thirty years of religious and political conflict among
13.1 WHY CAN'T WE ALL GET ALONG?