Here was my response:
I will be so bold as to assert that I can sum up World Religions in a single sentence: World Religion is the attempt to reconcile “truth” with “Truth”.
Every religion we’ve study seems to be on a search to take what they feel is right or good, and reconcile it with a force greater then themselves. It’s the search for where our feelings come from. It’s the journey we go on to find out, not what a star is made of, but what exists in between stars. It’s the acknowledgment that nothingness is still something, and that the end of our empirical knowledge of the true workings of the universe is also the beginning of our journey to the divine. In the words of Socrates “all I know is that I know nothing”.
To clarify, “truth” is the correspondence between object and thing. The fact that correspondence requires an interaction designates “truth” as a relationship. Something may be true from one point of view that is not from another. If I’m looking from the west wing of a building into a parking lot, I see five cars. If you are looking from the east you may only see four or you may see six. The fact that we are in different places does not make one of us a liar, it simply means that we see things differently from our various perspectives and that what is true for you is not for me. Truth, with a capital “T”, is the man in the helicopter who can see all possible parking lots and can definitively tell us how many, what color, and what model cars there are in the entire city. So, as you see by the expansion of this metaphor, my assertion that major world religions attempt to reconcile what they see with what they cannot see (but submit to the idea that there is One who can) is very convincing.
A common misconception of World Religions is that they are separate. I would posit that, in this day and age, they are parallel paths to the same destination. In antiquity, when there existed true polytheism on a mass scale (Norse and Greek/Roman mythology) there also existed true division between regional worships. However, suggesting that the idea of Brahma can really put Hinduism out of the polytheist family, we now exist in a world where the remaining popular beliefs are all on a search for a reunification with one god. This is essentially the same goal. I suspect that it would have been vastly more difficult to find common threads between Judaism and Norse belief than it is to find, for instance, commonalities between Christianity and Hinduism.
Thus, in some ways, our operational definition of religion as “providing social unity and a personal sense of salvation” both works and doesn’t. Traditionally, this was thought to mean that it brought unity to your specific society. However, as an example from my own faith, Christ discouraged this idea in an attempt at global, rather than local, unity. Jesus said in Matthew chapter 10
“Do not suppose that I have come to bring peace to the earth. I did not come to bring peace, but a sword. 35 For I have come to turn
” ‘a man against his father,
a daughter against her mother,
a daughter-in-law against her mother-in-law -
36a man’s enemies will be the members of his own household.’
Out of context this seems to be Jesus’ call for the end of social unity. However, when looking at the wider context of His life through the Gospels, we see the larger picture. In Matthew Chapter 12, Christ’s disciples inform him that his family would like to see him. Christ then rejects the center of the social structure, the blood family, and says that whosoever does the will of G-d are his family. In this, Christ is calling for the destruction of communal religious unity and suggesting that we may all be brothers and sisters under the Will of G-d. It’s also worth noting that this directly confounds the Moral Majority’s claim that the American family is the bedrock of our society.
This can also be seen in other major religions. Jews have taken to accepting converts and also are active in various forms of interfaith council. Even the Hasidic Rabbi who spoke with us in class seemed to have a very accepting notion of others faiths, even those that seemed to confound his own. Hindus have always been of the mind that we are all Brahma and it could be argued that the pluralization of World Religion(s) is but maya (the ego, which deludes us into thinking that we are separate). Buddhism has proven time and again that it embraces all faiths and requires only a cognizance of the noble paths. Even Islam recognizes its Western brethren as “people of the book” and has the faction of Sufism which mingles in Eastern faith. No matter where you go, if you can possibly sift out all of the power-struggles, land grabbing, and political posturing that taints the faiths of the world, we’ll see that we are ever working toward turning World Religions into it’s singular form, World Religion.
At the risk of being short winded I think that the above is the best way for me to describe World Religion. We could spend volumes going over each belief system and it’s thoughts and practices. This is worth doing, just as one cannot decide that 3 + 3 = 6 and that is the only way to get to six. We must realize that you can also divide, multiply, fraction, and otherwise cross-quantify six. The answer is always the same, but the methods are the beauty, not the conflict, of the problem.
