These “synthesizers” of world religions even have to ignore the variants within the same basic religious tradition; between the Theravada, Mahayana, Vajrayana, Zen, and Pure Land divisions of Buddhism, for example. They also tend to over-emphasize the importance of the more exotic branches of a tradition (such as the Sufis, within Islam) that are more “open” to new ideas, as well as the more esoteric (and often heterodox) thinkers within a tradition—such as Meister Eckhart within Christianity—normally at the expense of the more “mainstream” and generally-followed approaches to the religion. For example, the famed Zen scholar D.T. Suzuki was fond of quoting Eckhart’s statement, “The eye with which I see God is the same eye with which God sees me,” as being consistent with Zen Buddhism. However, while one may or may not personally like Billy Graham or Fulton Sheen, the fact is that they represent the beliefs of a lot more Christians than does Meister Eckhart. While the sort of hazy, mystical approach to religious truth of men like Huxley (who was obviously more heavily influenced by Vedanta than by the Apostles’ Creed) may indeed be correct, it can only be at the expense of proving the “incorrectness” of the basic beliefs of the other, more dogmatic traditions. Huxley’s pantheism may be able to account for John Calvin’s doctrine of predestination, but if Calvin is the one who is right, then Huxley is flat-out wrong.
The basic problem is that the religious beliefs of the major world religions are fundamentally incompatible. “Salvation” for a Christian is far different from the Nirvana of Buddhism and the Samadhi of Hinduism; the Paradise of Islam is far different from the “Pure Land” of Chinese and Japanese Buddhism; and the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob is far different from the Tao of Chinese religion. Even religions that have similar concepts have important differences: Zoroastrians, Jews, Muslims, and Christians all believe in a “resurrection of the dead,” but the events leading up to it are quite different in each tradition. Even solely within a single tradition, they have important differences: Catholics believe in a Purgatory of punishment; Eastern Orthodox explicitly reject the idea of Purgatory, yet believe in some kind of non-punitive “intermediate state” before one gets to Heaven; and Protestants reject Purgatory entirely. Catholics officially believe that unbaptized babies go to some place (traditionally called “Limbo”) that is less blessed than Heaven, whereas Protestants believe that children who die before the “age of accountability” do go to Heaven.
Some traditions—Catholic and Protestant alike—emphasize the reality of Hell and eternal damnation as a literal reality, as did American Calvinist Jonathan Edwards in his famous sermon, “Sinners In the Hands of an Angry God.” Catholic teachings on the horrors of Hell (including visions of the sufferings of the damned, related to us by saints and mystics) form a major subgroup in the art (e.g., Michelangelo, Blake) and literature (e.g., Dante’s Inferno, and James Joyce’s Portrait of the Artist As a Young Man) of the Western world. On the other hand, other Christians de-emphasize Hell, almost to the point of Universalism (i.e., the belief that “in the end, everybody will be saved”), causing some theologically conservative Christians to lament the fact that “sermons are never preached about Hell, any more.” And in fact, some of the sects and splinter groups like the Seventh-Day Adventists, Jehovah’s Witnesses, and Christadelphians teach that we do not have eternal souls, and that wicked people ultimately are simply annihilated, rather than spending all of eternity in conscious torment.
It isn’t possible for all of these religions and traditions to be correct. Unless, of course, you think that unsaved evangelicals go to Hell at death, whereas disfellowshipped Adventists are annihilated, while lapsed Catholics spend eons in Purgatory, notwithstanding that a lifetime sinner who repents on his death bed may get to go directly to Heaven. Then of course if you believed that, to be consistent you would also have to accept that faithful Muslims and Zoroastrians go to a heavenly Paradise, whereas Zen Buddhists and Taoists are simply extinguished; Hindus, Jains, Sikhs and Tibetan Buddhists are reincarnated, whereas Christians, Jews, Muslims, Zoroastrians and Bahá’í are not. (And in any case, what happens to atheists, agnostics, Deists, and other nonbelievers in life after death?)
Suppose that Christianity turns out to be the “true” religion: that means that only about one-third of the world’s population is following the true religion; if Islam is true, then the figure is only one-sixth, and the percentage is even smaller for Hinduism and Buddhism—about one-eighth and one-seventeenth, respectively. (And if it turns out that the Mormons really are the “True Church,” then only about one five-hundredth of the world’s population belongs to it.) And what if it’s only a smaller subgroup of the religion that is “correct”? What if it’s not Islam as a whole that’s correct, but only the Sufis? What if it’s not Hinduism overall that’s correct, but only the Hare Krishnas? What if it’s not Christianity in general that’s correct—or even Protestantism in general—but only the “Church of God” in its Anderson, Indiana branch? What if it’s not the Mormons in general, but only the Temple Lot sect? (We can easily imagine a situation where the only people who make it to Heaven are a literal 144,000.)
I think the one aspect of my quest so far that has been the most surprising— and discouraging—to me is the fact that all of these established religions seem to deal with the subject of the afterlife in a relatively superficial manner. You would think that for them, the question of life after death would be one of the utmost importance—and yet they give it relatively short shrift. In Charles Hodge’s voluminous and respected 3-volume Systematic Theology, the doctrine of life after death occupies only about 4% of his 2250-page total, and much of this is spent refuting conceptions with which Hodges disagrees, rather than explaining what he thinks the afterlife condition is like. The Christian fathers spent far more time discussing the Trinity than they did life after death. Evangelicals spend entire lifetimes arguing about when the “Rapture” is supposed to occur—is it Pre-Trib, Mid-Trib, or Post-Trib? Premillenial, Postmillenial, or Amillenial?—but they can’t even universally answer with assurance a simple question such as, “Will my deceased Catholic spouse and I be together as husband and wife in Heaven?”
Am I being too critical? Undoubtedly; after all, death is a topic that few people find attractive, or even interesting. (I was certainly in this category prior to Sophia’s death; you couldn’t have paid me to read an entire book on the question of life after death, whereas now I’ve read hundreds.) I guess that most priests, pastors and ministers have an attitude similar to most teachers: To do your job, you don’t really need to be an “expert”—you just need to stay a chapter ahead of your students. True, you may occasionally feel threatened or embarrassed when some smart aleck shows up that has done some outside reading, but chances are slim of your encountering someone that is genuinely knowledgeable about your subject (and you’ve probably learned some snappy “one-liners” to deal with the ordinary level of objections that you’ll encounter). When push comes to shove, it seems that very few people really want to get into very much detail about the afterlife; just read them a few verses from the Bible that sound comforting (e.g., “[T]o be absent from the body [is] to be present with the Lord”; 2 Cor 5:8—sort of), and they’re satisfied.
But I am in an entirely different position from people that were brought up in a particular religious tradition; I really don’t have any firm theological convictions, and I truly don’t know which position—if any—is the true one. I’m absolutely open-minded on the subject; I’m prepared to abandon any position that is untrue, and accept any position that is true. I will follow any religion, sect, practice, or metaphysical doctrine, if it can only show me what has happened to my Sophia, and how I can rejoin her.
But no one I’ve read seems to have anything that I can feel deep down in my gut, with genuine conviction. No one yet has given me any firm foundation upon which I can confidently base my life (and afterlife) on. Quite the contrary, the more I study, the more I am convinced that the relig
ious convictions of people are primarily culturally determined, and are mostly dependent on the kind of environment you grew up in. I’ve had to face it squarely—Sophia was a Catholic because she was raised that way. Her whole family was Catholic—she went to parochial schools until college, she went to Mass every Sunday; when she went to weddings, First Communions, and funerals, they were all Catholic. Who knows what she would have believed, if she had been raised differently? She might have been a Mormon, a Quaker, a Jehovah’s Witness—or even a tongues-talking, snake-handling backwoods Pentecostal. What would she have been if she had studied as much as I have?
I suspect that this is why so many people turn away from religion once they go away to college, or move away from home. When they are first confronted by a confident philosophy or anthropology professor with the question, “Why do you believe in God?” they are stumped. When you ask the average person, “How do you know that what you believe about your religion is true?” they have no answer, because they truly don’t know. (When they do claim to know, it’s probably only because they just read a book by Josh McDowell or Paul Little, or went to a seminar put on by Catholic Answers, or Outreach Judaism; they’re telling you what they have been taught, not what they have arrived at from their own study and conviction.) And when you press them on the issue, they aren’t very happy about it—probably because your questioning is exposing the very superficiality of their own beliefs.
Even those people who have converted from one religion to another do not necessarily persuade me, because for every person you can find that has that has converted from one belief to another, you can find someone that has gone in just the opposite direction. Thousands of Catholics are converting to Pentecostal churches, but so what?—they may just be doing so out of boredom, rather than out of any deep theological convictions; people left Pentecostal churches in droves after the Jim Bakker/PTL and Jimmy Swaggart scandals of the 1980s, as well. Protestant minister Scott Hahn converted to Catholicism (and has put out a fascinating book and audiotape detailing this journey), but he was already an extremely theologically conservative Protestant—who graduated from a conservative seminary in the Reformed tradition, and who believed in the infallibility of the Bible before and after his conversion—so he really only left a small conservative Christian group for a much larger one. (In fact, he is almost “out of the mainstream” within American Catholicism, which is quite often more liberal than he is, on issues such as birth control.) Similarly, for every drug addict or prostitute you can find that gets “saved” and reforms, there are others (raised in “good, church-going, God-fearing homes”) who enter such lives. (So much so that some Christian apologists and evangelists nowadays spend most of their evangelization time in Christian churches, trying to “reach” Christian young people, and persuade them to stay away from alcohol, drugs, and premarital sex.)
But interestingly enough, most so-called “secularists”—atheists, agnostics, freethinkers, humanists, or whatever—are just as bad as religious people. They may have had some personal reasons for abandoning the religious beliefs of their childhood (e.g., “I disagreed with the Church’s position on contraception,” “I got remarried after my divorce, and they treated me like dirt in church,” “They talked about money too much,” or “There were too many hypocrites,” etc.), but on the other hand, they probably didn’t have any real “positive” reasons to accept secularism. It is difficult to ground a belief in Atheism, for example, merely by attacking the religious conceptions of others (e.g., “If the Bible says that Joshua made the sun stand still, then the Bible must teach that the sun revolves around the earth”); a belief against something isn’t the same as a belief for something.
Consequently, when the children (raised without any religious upbringing) of secularists decide to join a Pentecostal Church, or Youth for Christ, or the Jehovah’s Witnesses, why should this be surprising to the parents? (“But we never even taught her about God!”) The reasons the parents have for rejection of traditional religion won’t work for their children, because the children weren’t raised in the same conditions as the parents. When the children inevitably start to consider the “deeper” issues of life (how many kids can make it through high school without having at least one friend or relative die?), their parents’ position makes no more sense to the children than did traditional religion to the parents—and the children may very choose to decide the matter for themselves.
* * *
I just re-read what I have been writing, and it is very discouraging. To see in black & white the degree of intellectual (and spiritual?) pride I am now exhibiting is frightening. (No wonder that “Pride” is always considered as one of the so-called “Deadly Sins.”) Do I now think myself somehow “better” than, or superior to, those who haven’t studied religion to the degree that I have? They’re really no different than I was prior to Sophia’s death; in fact, most people probably had much stronger convictions about religion than I had, since religion had never really been much of a concern for me. In all honesty, I must admit that “intellectual pride” is becoming a source of great temptation for me, because I now know that I have studied the issue of life after death more in-depth than many priests, ministers, and students of theology, and—may God forgive me—it does give me a feeling of “superiority” over others, in a religious sense.
The other day while I was riding a virtually empty bus, a young lady who was an evangelical Christian handed me a tract and attempted to “witness” to me, following some routine she must have learned in a book or class. (“Sir, do you know for certain that if you were to die today, that you would go to Heaven?”) My reply was, “Ms., the only people that claim to know something like that for ‘certain’ are people that have never really studied the issue. The largest Christian denomination in the world—the Catholic Church—doesn’ t believe that, for example. And since you asked me a question, let me ask you one: Have you ever read the Qur’an? No? Then how about the Bhagavad-Gita? Or the Tibetan Book of the Dead? You haven’t? Then your ‘certainty’ is worthless, because you don’t know anything outside of your own narrow tradition. You’re not that much different from an Islamic fundamentalist terrorist, who is ‘certain’ that he is going to go to Paradise by blowing himself up in an Israeli camp; he is willing to die for his beliefs, even.” I have to admit that I felt a kind of contempt for this poor teenager, as she slunk off the bus at the very next stop, too humiliated to even look at me.
Now, I’m ashamed of myself. What a terrible way to have treated a young woman who is overflowing with such faith that she simply wants to freely share it with other people. She wasn’t trying to “sell” me anything—she just wanted to tell me about something that was very precious to her. Of course she hasn’t read the Qur’an; she’s probably just finished reading the entire New Testament for the first time, and is completely excited about it. So what if she hasn’t read all those other books? Had I read any of them nine months ago? Instead of giving her such an arrogant reply, why didn’t I just explain to her that no, I wasn’t certain that I would go to Heaven if I were to die today, and what my reasons for uncertainty were? Maybe my honesty would have diverted her from her “canned” script, and we could have had a genuine conversation about spiritual matters.
If I want to be reunited with Sophia, I must learn to overcome such pride. The spiritual traditions of the world, even though they are theologically very diverse, at least have a great deal in common ethically—and whether it be the “Seven Deadly Sins” of the west, or the “Noble Eightfold Path” of the east, pride is almost uniquely singled out as a trap, by all means to be avoided.
And really, do I truly have any grounds for pride? So what if I have read a few books, and can hold my own in a discussion with a street evangelist, or a Jehovah’s Witness doing door-to-door work? There are theologians, philosophers, and religious thinkers that have thought long and hard about these issues for many decades, and who have written learned books
of critical acumen that have been subjected to rigorous peer-review—when compared to such people, I’m not even in their class. As Job said to God, “I spoke without understanding of things beyond me, which I did not know…. Therefore, I recant and relent, being but dust and ashes.” (42:3, 6)
So where does all this leave me?
Sitting here surrounded by books and ideas, but even more devoid of personal convictions than I started out with.
* * *
Something profoundly interesting just happened to me while waiting at a bus stop: I met a man who is a practitioner of the Sikh religion. I had just missed my bus, and I had a 30-minute wait for the next bus, so I sat on the bench and started to read the book (I always carry a book with me, for just such eventualities), An Introduction to Indian Philosophy. After I had sat reading for ten minutes or so, a tall Middle Eastern man wearing a turban sat down on the bench. After a few minutes, he happened to glance over, saw the title of my book, and asked me with genuine curiosity what it was about. After I told him, he explained that he was from India himself. With sudden interest, I asked if he was a Hindu or Buddhist, and he shook his head, saying that he was a Sikh. I explained to him that I had studied Sikhism somewhat, but was not as familiar with it as I was with Buddhism and Hinduism.
We had a fascinating conversation, that continued after we had boarded the bus. He is working as a consultant programmer, as do many East Indians in this country on work visas. He explained to me some of the Sikh customs: He told me about their P?ñj Kakke or “Five K’s,” that are intended to identify them publicly as Sikhs—much as Christians might wear a cross around their necks. He told me firmly that the purpose of the Five K’s was to indicate his willingness to defend— or die for—his faith. The uncut hair and beards of men is known as kes, and the turban is always worn to hold the longer hair comfortably, as well as cover the kangh? comb in the top-knot of his hair. He also wears the plain kar? wrist-band on his right wrist, and carries in his briefcase the sacramental sword or kirp?n,
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