Are All Religions the Same?
June 16, 2010, 8:09 am
Posted by Cathleen Kaveny
Stephen Colbert talks with Stephen Prothero about his new book:
| The Colbert Report | Mon – Thurs 11:30pm / 10:30c | |||
| Stephen Prothero | ||||
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At the very end of this segment Colbert asks, “Who’s winning?”
Competition; its destructive presence is so pervasive, and as a physician I see it as a great illness, best exemplified in the cancer cell, which wins every competition. The human cancer cell beats the body’s immune system, it beats surgical oblation, it beats chemotherapy, it wins all competitions at the expense of its host.
If competition is beating someone in order to come out on top, or undercutting someone to come out on top, then I see competition, and questions like Colbert’s, as one reason why religions so frequently come into the conversation as humanity prepares for war.
Are all religions the same? Yes and No. The particulars are different, but those religions I am familiar with are similar in their call that we aim to be better people, have better relationships, and how we might relate to God or the source of life. And when religious groups are coaxed into competition with each other they can be used to legitimize destructive means to apparently noble ends, and in that regard they are also similar.
I once wrote a piece with that title, which the editors changed to “All religions are the same”!
The cultivation of ecumenical dialogue between religions is a requisite for intellectual and spiritual sanity, and world peace.
Colbert’s interruptions were annoying, at first, but later drew out Prothero well. Prothero did a good job sighting the different problematics of the religions he mentioned. “Islam is winning… Christianity is losing…” — but if Islam is winning through prayer, this will purify Christianity as well.
It seems to me that an old argument for the existence of God is based upon the observation that all people, more or less, at all times and in all places, have a similar spiritual longing. Lewis’s theme in “Surprised by Joy,” developed in “The Abolition of Man,” has been taken up anew by Dr. Tim Keller in “The Reason for God.”
So, is Prothero doing the work of the militant atheists in doubting an universally-held human inclination?
Yikes! As to who is “winning”, that would be all who participate and finish The Race. I wonder if Mr.Prothero was an advisor in the final “Lost” episode? Jesus said IAM THE Way THE Truth and THE Life, not IAM one of many ways, truths and lives.
Mr.Prothero seems to be doing the work for those like, for example, the creators of “Lost”, who, rather than be considered militant atheists, wish to identify with a blending of religions in order to create one world religion with many different gods, sort of like paganism but with a twist.