Terry Mattingly: One essential and troubling religious truth

Posted by The_Elves

Over at Get Religion, Terry Mattingly reviews a recent article by Newsweek and examines the tendency among some journalists as well as some liberal religious leaders to believe "all religions are alike:"

I was flipping through my copy of Newsweek the other day and came across a headline that almost made me swoon. To make matters more interesting for people who care about religion news, this little article was part of the magazine’s giant “What You Need To Know Now” spread.

The headline said: “True or False: The Major Religions Are Essentially Alike.”

According to author Stephen Prothero of Boston University, the correct answer is “false.” Prothero is, of course, the author of the new book Religious Literacy: What Every American Needs to Know — And Doesn’t.

Here is now the Newsweek article opens:

At least since the first petals of the counterculture bloomed across the United States in the 1960s, it has been fashionable to affirm that all religions are beautiful — and all are true. The proof text for this happy affirmation comes, appropriately enough, from the Hindu Vedas rather than the Christian Bible: “Truth is one, the sages call it by many names.”

According to this multicultural form of wisdom, the world’s religions are merely different paths up the same mountain. But are they?


Anyone willing to deal with facts and doctrines, rather than emotions and fog, has to come to the conclusion that the various world religions clash over and over again, creating eternal divides that are real and can only be covered up by living in a state of denial, according to Prothero.

Yet that is precisely where many people — including scores of journalists — like to live.

Here's the full Get Religion entry.

Filed under: * Culture-Watch • Multiculturalism, pluralism • * Religion News & Commentary • Other Faiths • * Theology • Apologetics

4 Comments
Posted July 3, 2007 at 7:31 am [Printer Friendly] [Print w/ comments]



1. William Scott wrote:

We have differences in our own communion that some would claim amount to two or more different religions.  How do we articulate the importance that these differences make in our own context?  The universal ecumenical movement and the plurality/diversity movement in our own church are related and rooted in the same doctrine: diversity is good.  Implied in this is that proposing unique status is bad.  Ironically this limits all that is interesting about diversity, and only leaves us with whatever general principals the whole mass of faiths can be rendered down too. 

Compassion is often presented as the general principal of all faith traditions.  This may be true, and compassion is certainly a principal virtue.  It is the practice of particulars in our faith that lead us to compassion.  We cannot start with compassion it is a result of proper conversion and practice. 

I was glad to see the difference between Buddhist and Christian views of suffering pointed out.  Buddha sought a way to avoid, or transcend suffering and left a practice that others could imitate to do the same.  Christ became the suffering of the suffering of the world to save us.  This is no small difference. 

It is a shame that the article then jumped to geopolitics.

July 3, 9:20 am | [comment link]
2. John A. wrote:

Your second paragraph reminds me of the following from GK Chesterton: “The modern world is not evil; in some ways the modern world is far too good. It is full of wild and wasted virtues. When a religious scheme is shattered (as Christianity was shattered at the Reformation), it is not merely the vices that are let loose. The vices are, indeed, let loose, and they wander and do damage. But the virtues are let loose also; and the virtues wander more wildly, and the virtues do more terrible damage. The modern world is full of the old Christian virtues gone mad. The virtues have gone mad because they have been isolated from each other and are wandering alone.”

This quote is from Chapter III of “Orthodoxy” titled “The Suicide of Thought”  It can be found at http://www.ccel.org.

July 3, 12:32 pm | [comment link]
3. Wilfred wrote:

So Mother Theresa’s religion and Ayman al-Zawahiri’s religion are “essentially alike”? 

What sort of mind, familiar with the lives of these two individuals, would be even capable of formulating this thought?

July 3, 5:50 pm | [comment link]
4. John A. wrote:

#3 Wilfred, I agree.  It is amazing that anyone can gloss over the differences but this ‘thinking’ (or lack of thinking) is based on a lie.  The lie is that all “true” religions are similar.  The differences are just inflated by fundamentalists of all backgrounds and the parts that are in conflict are simply outdated parts that really should be dismissed.

July 3, 9:50 pm | [comment link]
Registered members must log in to comment.



Next entry (above): An Open Thread: Apologetics -- How do you approach inter-faith debate

Previous entry (below): Derek Olsen: Communion without Baptism

Return to blog homepage

Return to Mobile view (headlines)