WHO ARE WE? BAYSIDE COMMUNITAS.COM RELIGIOUS PLURALISM

HOW DO WE PEACEFULLY COEXIST? (1) Americans must face the fact that the challenge of living with our deepest—that is, our religiously grounded—differences is one of the world’s great issues today.

RELIGIOUS PLURALISM

A COMMON GENUS According to religious pluralists, the various religions of the world all derive from a common genus—“the lamps are different, but the Light is the same.” The “Real” (i.e., the common genus of all religions) is ineffable— “the sacred is a mystery beyond all our concepts and images” and therefore, “no vision can adequately represent God.”

RELIGIOUS PLURALISM How is the ineffable “Real” related to the religions of the world? Well, if religion is a response, or a range of responses, what is it a response to? Christianity says the Holy Trinity; Islam, the strictly unitary Allah; Hinduism says that it is Brahman; and so on. But in regarding each of these, and the other major world traditions, as more or less equally effective contexts of salvation/liberation, we are regarding them as responses to that to which religion is a response—which I am referring to as the Real.

PLURALIST MORAL OBJECTIONS TO EXCLUSIVISM If the exclusivist believes that: (1) the Holy Spirit’s internal witness to saving faith in Christ is assurance of personal salvation and (2) apart from a person having the Spirit, they do not belong to Christ, then he or she must logically believe that those who hold to something incompatible with these evangelical premises have embraced error. But are the religious pluralist’s charges against the exclusivist justified? The pluralist considers the “exclusivist” to be arrogant, triumphal, imperialistic and dishonest. The allegations of the pluralist against the exclusivist are, for the most part, ad hominem. The ad hominem fallacy occurs when a person (in this case, the exclusivist) is the focus of personal attack instead of his position.

THE PLURALIST’S HYPOCRISY IF PLURALISM IS TO BE ACCEPTED: Either there is no God or, The god that exists does not hold people accountable for what they believe; he, she or it requires absolutely nothing from his, hers or its creation; [he] has no standards, imperatives or truths for his creation to live by. That god is radically different from all other objects of worship in any religion (every religion has meditation/prayer, rituals, etc.); this assumes a particular view of “god” that is better than anyone else’s view; the pluralist is placing their “god” above all others – this is the pluralist’s hypocrisy. Bertrand Russell: “Either all the religions of the world are wrong or one is right and the rest are wrong but they can not all be right.”

INTELLECTUAL OBJECTIONS TO EXCLUSIVISM Religious pluralists charge that exclusivists are thinking in an intellectually arbitrary manner regarding their Acceptance of the two exclusivist premises: (1) The Holy Spirit‘s internal witness to saving faith in Christ is assurance of personal salvation and (2) apart from a person having the Spirit, they do not belong to Christ. How can the exclusivist know his point of view is true when it is evident that the religious beliefs of a great majority of the earth’s people depend on accidents of birth? A child born to Buddhist parents in Malaysia is very likely to be a Buddhist all of her life, and likewise, the son of Muslim parents in Jordan and the daughter of Christian parents in Chile. What should we conclude from the observations of the Religious Pluralists? Does the truth of an individual’s Religion depend on their place of birth, the time of their birth or the particular ideological/religious orientation they were induced to accept during childhood? For example, if I was born in Germany and grew up under the influence of the Third Reich, I may have been a Nazi. Does this mean that Nazism is true? Logically, if P’s religious beliefs are such that if P was born somewhere else and at a different time, he would not hold his present beliefs, then apparently there is something wrong with his believing them. Religious pluralism is “beguiled by the cosmetically courteous idea that sincerity or privilege of birth is all that counts and that truth is subject to the beholder. In no other discipline of life can one be so naive as to claim inherited belief or insistent belief as the sole determiner of truth. Why, then, do we make the catastrophic error of thinking that all religions are right and that it does not matter whether the claims they make are objectively true?” (Ravi Zacharias)