By Mano Singham
There is a puzzle that arises from the idea of there being just one god and many religions for which religious people might be able to give an answer: Why do the people of one monotheistic religion fight with or try to convert people of another monotheistic religion?
We know that there have always been conflicts between the followers of the different religions, each calling the other heathens or heretics or infidels or apostates and the like. A vast amount of blood has been shed by people in the service of their own particular god. Why is this?
If you think about it for a minute this just does not make sense. If you are a devout Christian, you presumably believe there is just one god and you pray to that god. If there is only one god, then there can be no possibility of worshipping a 'false' god. So logically, any other person who also believes in one god and prays to it (whatever they may call their own god) must be praying to the same god that you are praying to, since you are both sure that there is no other god. Since Christians and Muslims and Jews all believe that there is only one god, they must all be praying and worshiping the same, identical god. In other words, all religious people who believe in a single god must be effectively members of the same religion, though they give different names to their gods.
So why would religious people fight wars over religion? Why would they discriminate against people of other religions and proselytize and convert members of other faiths? Why care at all what the names of the other gods are? Why not treat people of other religions the same way that (say) Christians treat Christians in other countries who worship in other languages. They might have a different name for god in their own language but it is still considered to be the same god. Those people are not treated as if they belong to a different religion.
It is true that the forms and rituals are different for different religions. It is also true that people use different religious texts and thus, in addition to giving different names, also give their god different properties and believe that their god seeks different things. But if there is only one god, then all revelations of that one god must be equivalent at some deep level, and the differences merely superficial.
The Baha'i religion is one of the very few major ones that takes this truly inclusive attitude, and teaches that all major religions come from the one god and thus there cannot be a 'false' god or religion. They believe that Abraham, Krishna, Zoroaster, Moses, Buddha, Jesus, Muhammad, and others are all messengers of the same god, and that their own founder Bahá'u'lláh (who was born in what is now Iran in 1817 and died in 1892) was the latest in that line.
I can understand religious people thinking that god must be annoyed at us atheists because we find the whole idea of god to be ridiculous. But religious people want to believe in god. Assuming that god wants to be worshipped (which is a really odd idea when you think about it), then all these people are worshipping that one and only god, since there is no other god. If he wanted them to worship him in a specific way using a specific name (which seems a little petty, if you ask me, like some people who get offended if you do not address them by their titles) based on a specific book, why would he allow people to be led astray by providing them with charismatic prophets and religious books that make them worship in a different way? It seems like a cruel trick to play on people, no? Surely god cannot care what name people use when they pray or worship him or what properties they ascribe to him or what books they use?
All the different trappings of the various religions are due to the so-called prophets of the various religions (Moses, Jesus, Mohammed, etc.), who claimed to speak on god's behalf and say they know how god wanted people to concretely show their devotion. If only one religion can be the true religion, then at least all but one of these people must have been delusional. Otherwise one would have to think that the one god deliberately told the different prophets different things to tell people. But surely god cannot want to blame ordinary people because of the prophets' divergent messages. If Muslims (or Christians or Jews or Hindus) worship the "wrong" way to the "wrong" god, then it must be the one god's fault for creating this confusion.
Salman Rushdie reads a terrific passage from his book The Satanic Verses that describes how 'holy books' get written and how it might be possible for the prophet's message to get distorted. For this blasphemy, Rushdie received a death sentence from the Ayatollah Khomeini that, fortunately, was not carried out.
The hostility between religions, or the widespread idea that one religion is right and the others wrong, makes sense only if you accept the idea that there are many gods in competition with each other to maximize the number of their believers.
Or perhaps people think that there is one god but that he deliberately creates rival religions and prophets as a kind of IQ test, to see which people are smart enough to select the 'right' god to see who gets admitted into heaven. This seems unbelievably cruel to people the world over who have a simple faith in the god they learned about as children from their families.
I must admit that this question never occurred to me while I was a believer. One of the disconcerting things that I discovered after shifting from belief to atheism is how so many questions that should have been obvious for me to ask never even occurred to me until I stopped believing. It is as if religious belief shuts down that part of your brain that thinks logically and would ask the kinds of questions that expose the contradictions.
In that sense, religion is antithetical to a scientific approach. This does not mean that religious people can't be good scientists. It is just that they have to keep separate that part of the brain they use for religion from that part they use for science, and use different standards of reason and evidence for the two spheres.
POST SCRIPT: Jesus the racist?
The BBC comedy series That Mitchell and Webb Look puts the Good Samaritan story in a different light.
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One Light Many Lamps
You're right, it doesn't make any sense, but then how much of what human beings do to each other in the name of politics, religion, race, gender or other differences make sense except at the basest level of protecting one's turf?
Something someone said to me during a period of my life when I was at loose ends in a religious sense, was that we were looking at the diversity in religion from our point of view—from the ground, if you will. From God's point of view, all religions were one. The Prophets didn't come for the purpose of setting up different faiths, they came to teach a diverse population of humans certain foundational spiritual principles that would conduce to our advancement and eventual unity as our widely separated groups came into closer contact and discovered how tiny our world really was. WE set them up as competitors because it's in our nature to compete (well, and a host of other psychological and sociological reasons both complex and simple.)
I have watched three kids go through school now -- my youngest is in second grade. From my adult POV all her teachers are working as a team to educate her, bringing her from simplistic understandings of her subjects to more complex and detailed understandings. But from her POV, the world of education looks somewhat different.
For example, she recently encountered the concept of negative numbers when her sister brought home some math homework. "Your teacher lied!" she told her sister. "My teacher told me the smallest number is zero so there's no such thing as negative numbers!" My 15 year old tried to explain the situation, but it came down to "Then, you're saying my teacher lied to me!"
Oddly, I used the example of the differences between the teachings of Moses and Christ to explain to the 6 year old why neither teacher was lying.
I also had occasion to explain why her 2nd grade teacher and k-1 teacher are not competing with each other for her loyalty. When she first moved into her k-1 class, too, she felt as if liking her k-1 teacher was somehow being disloyal to her kindergarten teacher, though she'd been in her class only about a week.
My daughter's perception that the teachers are competitors or that a revelation of new information constitutes a lie is the result of her incomplete understanding of the situation.
Likewise, I think when we look at the Avatars from the ants-eye view we see individual Teachers. It does not occur to many of us that they might be from the same school. This, despite the fact that each Revealer of religion has indicated that this is the case. Krishna noted that He had come many times and would come again "whenever vice and injustice mount the throne"; Buddha said He was not the first Buddha and would not be the last; Moses foretold the appearance of "a Prophet like him"; Christ said that if He went away God would send another Counselor; Baha'u'llah stated that the Prophets of God had come since time began and would continue to come till it ended.
Why have we historically ignored those passages of scripture that talk about future revelation? Well, given the way population groups have moved and congregated historically and the nature of humans to distrust the "other", is it surprising that we fear contact with the different, and the alien? Do we not, rather, expect that the next Avatar or Prophet when He comes will be OUR Avatar and will be just like us?