God Is Not One

by Prothero, Stephen

  At the Chicago-based Interfaith Youth Core run by Eboo Patel, there is no requirement that participants bargain to agreement. In fact, Patel actively discourages IFYC participants from discussing politics and theology. Instead, he sets them to work on community-based projects, encouraging them to discuss instead how their very different traditions impel them toward a shared commitment to service. As a result, Patel (who is Muslim himself) is able to get Orthodox Jews, conservative Catholics, and born-again Christians to work side-by-side. “Religion is a force in the world,” Patel says. “Whether it divides or unites is up to us.” 6 Whether religion divides or unites also depends on whether we can learn to talk about it with some measure of empathetic understanding.

  Among the casualties of the late, great culture wars is the recognition that there are two ways to talk about religion. There is the religious way of synagogue prayers and church sermons—the way that religious people preach their creeds, their gods, their rituals. But there is also a secular way to talk about religion. This second way does not assume that religion in general, or any religion in particular, is either true or false, because to make such an assumption is to be talking about religion religiously. It aims instead simply to observe and to report, as objectively as possible, on this thing human beings do, for good or for ill (or both).

  There is a difference between doing art history and making art. Art historians can be artists, of course, but creating art and interpreting it are two very different projects. And so it goes with doing and interpreting religion. Some scholars of religion are religious, of course, but there is no faith requirement for the job, just as it is not necessary to be a sculptor or painter to be an art historian. Of course, scholars of religion often allow their own theological biases to slip into their work, speaking about religion in two ways at once. The problem with Godthink of either the New Atheist or the perennial philosophy variety is that each camp fails to see what should be obvious to any outsider—that theirs are theological positions too. When Richard Dawkins calls religion delusional, he is speaking as a theologian (or atheologian), not as an objective reporter. When Huston Smith calls all religions one, he is doing theology too.

  If religion did not matter, this collective confusion would not cloud our understanding of the world. If human beings acted in their families, communities, and nations purely on the basis of greed and power, then economists and political scientists could do a decent job of describing the world. But people act every day on the basis of religious beliefs and behaviors that outsiders see as foolish or dangerous or worse. Allah tells them to blow themselves up or to give to the poor, so they do. Jesus tells them to bomb an abortion clinic or to build a Habitat for Humanity house, so they do. Because God said so, Jews, Christians, and Muslims believe that this land is their land, so they fight for it in the name of G-d or Jesus or Allah. Call this good news or bad news, but by any name it is the way things are. So if we want to live in the real world rather than down a rabbit hole of our own imagining then we need to reckon with it.

  To reckon with the world as it is, we need religious literacy. We need to know something about the basic beliefs and practices of the world’s religions. This book has tried to offer this literacy. It has outlined how the eight rival religions wrestle with the human predicament—their problems, solutions, techniques, and exemplars. It has demonstrated how different religions emphasize different dimensions of religion—the ethical and ritual dimensions in Confucianism, for example, and the legal and narrative dimensions in Judaism. Along the way it has ranked these religions from the greatest of the great on down—from Islam to Christianity to Confucianism to Hinduism to Buddhism to Yoruba religion to Judaism to Daoism. But religious literacy of this sort is not enough.

  Today we have plenty of Christians doing Christian theology in public, plenty of atheists doing atheology in public, and plenty of perennial philosophers telling the public that all religions are one. Our airwaves and bookstores are clogged with angry arguments for this religion and against that religion. On Hardball and other television shows that sound like they were named by adolescent boys, producers routinely pit ideologues on the Secular Left against ideologues on the Religious Right. So there is no shortage of religious (and antireligious) name-calling. What is missing is this second way of talking about religion—a voice that sounds more like the old-fashioned news gathering of CBS and the BBC than like the contemporary vituperations of Fox News and MSNBC. This book has tried to speak in this different voice, offering new ways to enter into the ten thousand gates of human religiosity.

  There is a famous folk tale about blind men examining an elephant. It likely originated in India before the Common Era, but it eventually spread to East and Southeast Asia and then around the world. According to this folk tale, blind men are examining an elephant. One feels his trunk and declares it to be a snake. Another feels his tail and declares it a rope. Others determine that the elephant is a wall, pillar, spear, or fan, depending on where they are touching it. But each insists he is right, so much quarreling ensues.

  Among true believers of the perennial philosophy sort, this story is gospel. In their eyes, the elephant is God and the blind men are Christians and Muslims and Jews who mistake their particular (and partial) perspectives on divinity for the reality of divinity itself. Because God is beyond human imagining, we are forever groping around for God in the dark. It is foolish to say that your religion alone is true and all other religions are false. No one has the whole truth, but each is touching the elephant. So, concludes the Hindu teacher (and inspiration for many perennialists) Ramakrishna, “one can realize God through all religions.”7

  But this folk tale also demonstrates how different religions are, since it has been told in various ways and put to various uses by various religious groups. Among Buddhists, it shows that speculation on abstract metaphysical questions causes suffering. Among Sufis, it shows that God can be seen through the heart but not the senses. Hindus read it as a parable about how “God can be reached by different paths.”8 Finally, modern Western writers such as the British poet John Godfrey Saxe turn it into a tale of the stupidity of theology:

  So oft in theologic wars,

  The disputants, I ween,

  Rail on in utter ignorance

  Of what each other mean,

  And prate about an Elephant

  Not one of them has seen!9

  For me, this story is a reminder not of the unity of the world’s religions (as Ramakrishna and the perennialists would have us believe), or of their shared stupidity (as Saxe and the New Atheists would argue), but of the limits of human knowledge. It is commonplace to think of religions as unchanging dogmas demanding unqualified assent. And there are no doubt fundamentalists inside most religions who see things just this way. But one function of the transcendent is to humble us, remind us that our thoughts are not the thoughts of God or the Great Goddess—to remind us that, at least for the time being, we see through a glass, darkly. Yes, religious people offer solutions to the human predicament as they see it. Yet these solutions inevitably open up more questions than they close down. This is definitely true of Confucius and Hillel, who, perhaps more than any of the figures discussed in this book, followed Rilke’s admonition to “love the questions themselves.”10 But it is also true of Muhammad, who once said, “Asking good questions is half of learning,” and of Jesus, whose parables seem designed less to teach us a lesson than to move us to scratch our heads.11

  When it comes to safeguarding the world from the evils of religion, including violence by proxy from the hand of God, the claim that all religions are one is no more effective than the claim that all religions are poison. Far more powerful is the reminder that any genuine belief in what we call God should humble us, remind us that, if there really is a god or goddess worthy of the name, He or She or It must surely know more than we do about the things that matter most. This much, at least, is shared across the great religions.

  Notes

  Intro
duction

  1. The sole surviving copy of this book can be found at the Huntington Library and Art Gallery in San Marino, California. See it online at: http://www.blakearchive.org/exist/blake/archive/work.xq?workid=aro&java=yes. Blake wrote, “As all men are alike (tho infinitely various), so all religions … have one source,” which he referred to as “the Poetic Genius.”

  2. Huston Smith, The World’s Religions: Our Great Wisdom Traditions (New York: HarperSanFrancisco, 1991), 73.

  3. Dalai Lama, An Open Heart: Practicing Compassion in Everyday Life (Boston: Little, Brown, 2001), 8–9.

  4. Smith, World’s Religions, 73. “Those who circle the mountain, trying to bring others around to their paths, are not climbing,” Smith adds.

  5. Swami Sivananda, “The Unity That Underlies All Religions,” http://www.dlshq.org/religions/unirel.htm.

  6. See Reuven Firestone, “Argue, for God’s Sake—or, a Jewish Argument for Argument,” Journal of Ecumenical Studies 39, no. 1–2 (2002): 47–57.

  7. Adam B. Seligman, “Tolerance, Tradition and Modernity,” Cardozo Law Review 24, no. 4 (2003): 1645–56. In addition to writing sociological works on this topic, Seligman runs The Tolerance Project and the International Summer School on Religion and Public Life (http://www.issrpl.org).

  8. Smith, World’s Religions, 5, 388–89.

  9. Sivananda, “Unity That Underlies All Religions.”

  10. Hans Küng, On Being a Christian, trans. Edward Quinn (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1976), 98.

  11. Tracy McNicoll, “Courting Islamic Cash in France,” Newsweek, September 21, 2009, 12.

  12. W. E. B. DuBois, The Souls of Black Folk: Etches and Sketches (Chicago: A. C. McClurg, 1903), 23. I first heard this argument from Eboo Patel of the Interfaith Youth Core.

  13. Ninian Smart, Dimensions of the Sacred: An Anatomy of the World’s Beliefs (Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 1996).

  14. Abraham Joshua Heschel, “No Religion Is an Island,” in No Religion Is an Island: Abraham Joshua Heschel and Interreligious Dialogue, eds. Harold Kasimow and Byron L. Sherwin (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 1991), 3–22. “Parochialism has become untenable,” Heschel writes. “There was a time when you could not pry out of a Boston man that the Boston state house is not the hub of the solar system or that one’s own denomination has not the monopoly of the holy spirit. Today we know that even the solar system is not the hub of the universe” (5–6).

  15. Quoted in Eric J. Sharpe, Comparative Religion: A History (London: Duckworth, 1975), 36.

  16. I hope it is clear that I am not trying to revive the shopworn division of the world’s religions into orthodox “great traditions” of the lettered and heterodox “little traditions” of the unlettered. On this division, see, e.g., Clifford Wilcox, Robert Redfield and the Development of American Anthropology, 2nd ed. (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2006).

  17. World Religion Database, http://www.worldreligiondatabase.org. Unless otherwise noted, the demographic data on the world’s religions in this book comes from this resource.

  18. “The List: The World’s Fastest-Growing Religions,” Foreign Policy, May 2007, http://www.foreignpolicy.com/story/cms.php?story_id=3835. Islam’s growth rate is 1.84 percent. Christianity, which is benefiting from both high birth rates and mass conversions in the Global South, is growing 1.38 percent per year.

  19. Christopher Hitchens, God Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything (New York: Twelve Books, 2007).

  20. Max Hastings, “Mohammed Is Now the Third Most Popular Boy’s Name in England,” MailOnline, September 10, 2009, http://www.tiny.cc/8ET3Y.

  21. David Masci, “An Uncertain Road: Muslims and the Future of Europe,” The Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life, October 2005, http://pewforum.org/docs/?DocID=60.

  22. The index to Axel Michaels, Hinduism: Past and Present, trans. Barbara Harshav (Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 2004) has ten separate entries on “salvation,” and Michaels refers throughout to “sin” (see, e.g., p. 16). In the Buddhist context, Ninian Smart refers to “salvation” in his Religions of Asia (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall, 1993), 107; and D. T. Suzuki refers to “sin” in his Essays in Zen Buddhism: (Second Series) (London: Luzac, 1933), 243. Even Daoism is routinely enlisted into the “sin” and “salvation” camp. See, e.g., Julia Ching, “East Asian Religions,” in World Religions: Eastern Traditions, 2nd ed., ed. Willard G. Oxtoby (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 2001), 392.

  23. Smith, World’s Religions, 73.

  24. James Fadiman and Robert Frager, eds., Essential Sufism (New York: HarperCollins, 1999), 82.

  25. Rainer Maria Rilke, Rilke on Love and Other Difficulties, trans. John J. L. Mood (New York: Norton, 1975), 25; Walt Whitman, “The Wound-Dresser,” in his Leaves of Grass (Philadelphia: David McKay, 1891–92), 242.

  26. Richard Rorty, “Religion as a Conversation Stopper,” Common Knowledge 3, no. 1 (1994): 1–6. Here Rorty is taking on Stephen L. Carter, The Culture of Disbelief: How American Law and Politics Trivialize Religious Devotion (New York: Basic Books, 1993).

  27. Augustine, Confessions, 10.33.50 in Augustine of Hippo: Selected Writings, trans. Mary T. Clark (New York: Paulist Press, 1984), 150.

  Chapter One: Islam: The Way of Submission

  1. “Public Expresses Mixed Views of Islam, Mormonism,” The Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life, September 25, 2007, http://pewforum.org/surveys/religionviews07. The top ten single words associated with Islam (in order) were: “devout/devoted,” “fanatic/fanatical,” “different,” “peace/peaceful,” “confused/confusing,” “radical,” “strict,” “terror/terrorism,” “dedicated,” “violence/violent.”

  2. “The Great Divide: How Westerners and Muslims View Each Other,” Pew Global Attitudes Project, June 22, 2006, http://pewglobal.org/reports/display.php?ReportID=253.

  3. Laurie Goodstein, “Top Evangelicals Critical of Colleagues over Islam,” New York Times, May 8, 2003, http://www.nytimes.com/2003/05/08/us/top-evangelicals-critical-of-colleagues-over-islam.html.

  4. All quotations from the Quran are, unless otherwise noted, from A. J. Arberry, The Koran Interpreted (New York: Touchstone, 1996).

  5. World Religion Database, http://www.worldreligiondatabase.org. China is not typically listed in the top ten, largely because it is notoriously difficult to gather data on religious affiliation there, but China could well be one of the most populous countries in the Muslim world.

  6. “Islamic Extremism: Common Concern for Muslim and Western Publics, Pew Global Attitudes Project, July 14, 2005, http://pewglobal.org/reports/display.php?PageID=809; “Islam and the West: Searching for Common Ground,” Pew Global Attitudes Project, July 18, 2006, http://pewglobal.org/commentary/display.php?AnalysisID=1009; “Great Divide: How Westerners and Muslims View Each Other,” Pew Global Attitudes Project, June 22, 2006, http://pewglobal.org/reports/display.php?ReportID=253.

  7. See Jack Shaheen, Reel Bad Arabs: How Hollywood Vilifies a People (New York: Olive Branch Press, 2003).

  8. William C. Chittick, The Sufi Doctrine of Rumi (Bloomington, IN: World Wisdom, 2005), 82.

  9. Seyyed Hossein Nasr, Ideals and Realities of Islam (London: George Allen & Unwin, 1985), 22.

  10. Some Western critics claim that Islam has six pillars rather than five, and that jihad is that sixth pillar. Some contemporary Islamist groups, most notably al-Qaeda and the Taliban, also hold this view. But the overwhelming majority of Muslims, both past and present, restrict these practices to five.

  11. Some Muslim countries pay for their citizens to make the hajj. In 2008, Nigerian states sent 84,878 Muslims to Mecca, at a total cost of $127 million. After arguing that their pilgrimages to Jerusalem were at least as worthy of government subsidies as the hajj of Muslims, 17,000 Nigerian Christians received subsidies of $17 million that same year to become “JPs,” or Jerusalem pilgrims. See Gabriel Omoh, “Nigeria: Citizens Spend N35 Billion on Pilgrimages,” Vanguard, January 5, 2009, http://allafrica.com/stories/200901051100.html.

 
12. It should be noted that few Muslims read the Quran through the sola scriptura (scripture alone) strategy of Protestants. More like rabbinic Jews and Roman Catholics, they read this text through a long tradition of interpretation that in many cases softens the hard edges of difficult passages not only on war but also on other controversial topics such as women’s rights.

  13. “A Rising Tide Lifts Mood in the Developing World,” Pew Global Attitudes Project, July 24, 2007, http://pewglobal.org/reports/display.php?ReportID=257. American Muslims are far less likely to support al-Qaeda than Muslims in other countries, but even in the United States one in twenty Muslims has a favorable view of that organization. Equally troublingly, only 40 percent of American Muslims believe that Arabs were responsible for the 9/11 attacks. The rest either said they did not know or put the blame on Israel or the United States. See “Muslim Americans: Middle Class and Mostly Mainstream,” Pew Research Center, May 22, 2007, http://pewresearch.org/pubs/483/muslim-americans.

  14. Michael H. Hart, The 100: A Ranking of the Most Influential Persons in History (New York: Citadel Press, 1992).

  15. S. H. Pasha pamphlet, undated, but handed out on the streets of Atlanta in the 1990s (personal collection of author).

  16. Wilfred Cantwell Smith, Islam in Modern History (New York: New American Library, 1959), 26. Continuing in this line of thinking, the parallel to the Bible in Islam is not the Quran but the Hadith.

  17. Arberry translation, modified from “man” to “the human being” because in the original Arabic the noun is gender neutral.

  18. Abraham J. Heschel, The Prophets (New York: Harper & Row, 1962), 12. “The threat of punishment is one of the most prominent themes of the prophetic orations,” Heschel added (187).