To think that religions are different paths to the same wisdom is a lovely sentiment, but it’s untrue, disrespectful, and dangerous. This idea is propounded by Boston University religion professor Stephen Prothero in his newly released book,
God is Not One: The Eight Rival Religions That Run the World—and Why Their Differences Matter (HarperOne, 400 pages). Prothero says that to pretend that the religions are the same “is to refuse to take seriously the beliefs and practices of ordinary religious folk who for centuries have had no problem distinguishing the Nicene Creed of Christianity from the Four Noble Truths of Buddhism from the Shahadah of Islam. It is also to lose sight of the unique beauty of each of the world’s religions.”
Prothero instead advocates a realistic view of where religious rivals clash and where they can cooperate. He asks: “How can we make sense of the ongoing conflict in Kashmir if we pretend that Hinduism and Islam are one and the same? Or of the impasse in the Middle East, if we pretend that there are no fundamental disagreements between Judaism, Christianity, and Islam?”
He argues that 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. “For most of world history,” he explains, “human beings have seen religious rivals as inferior to themselves — practitioners of empty rituals, perpetrators of bogus miracles, and purveyors of fanciful myths. This way of seeing has given us religious violence from the Crusades and the Holocaust to Rwanda and Nigeria… What we need is a realistic view of where religious rivals clash and where they can cooperate. The world is what it is. And both tolerance and respect are empty virtues until we actually know whatever it is we are supposed to be tolerating or respecting.”
Read Stephen Prothero’s article “Separate Truths” in BostonGlobe.com now!Read a product description of God is Not One in Amazon.com now!ABOUT THE AUTHOR:Stephen Prothero is a professor in the Department of Religion at Boston University and the author of
The New York Times bestseller
Religious Literacy: What Americans Need to Know (HarperOne, 2007). He has commented on religion on dozens of National Public Radio programs, and on television on CNN, NBC, MSNBC, FOX, and PBS. A regular contributor to the
Wall Street Journal and
USA Today, he has also written for
The New York Times,
Slate,
Salon, the
Washington Post, the
Los Angeles Times, and the
Boston Globe. Prothero received his BA from Yale in American Studies and his PhD in the Study of Religion from Harvard.
