Problem with Pluralism

I wanted to take a moment to step back and look at the project as a whole. To evaluate what we have done so far, and what we have discovered. Wendy Doniger wrote a book called The Implied Spider: Politics and Theology in Myth, where she looks at the definition of a myth, specifically a religious myth, and evaluates their purpose. She defines myth as: “A tool in the hands of human beings” and “reveals certain basic cultural attitudes to important (usually insoluble) questions”. Basically, a myth is a sacred story that tells us the deepest truths about every aspect of our lives. She means the fiction that makes reality real; a story that can bring reality into closer focus. These myths are acted out in the sacred rituals of each religion.

Each religion is designed to answer these basic insoluble questions; a few being the ones that we are asking in our interviews. Doniger describes this as looking at life through a telescope, seeing the broad picture and interpreting life through this lens. These are the questions that religious myths look at, and try to answer on the microscopic level, the more personal perspective. What we have seen through our interviews is that the answers to these telescopic questions are individual people’s microscopic perspectives influenced by their religious myths and acted out in their own religious rituals. Some of those religious myths are interpreted within a certain religion and believed by most members of that religion, but as we have seen commonly throughout our interview process, many of those myths (creation, for example) are becoming individualized to fit the belief systems of the individual and transforming to a deeper and more meaningful level for that individual. Roof discusses this shift from a religious community to individuality as we have discussed in previous posts. Robert Bellah, et al. also highlights on this theme in Habits of the Heart: Individualism and commitment in American Life. He claims that, “The American pattern of privatizing religion while at the same time allowing it some public functions has proven highly compatible with the religious pluralism that has characterized America from the colonial and grown more and more pronounced.” Bellah, 225.

This leads to a problem with that pluralism. If there can be more than one explanation to questions within a certain religion, and all the explanations are correct even if it is to the individual, then other religions and their explanations must be correct as well. However, we live in a world where there are competing claims of truth in religion; somewhere deep inside we believe that we are right, and there (logically) can’t be more that one right answer to a given question. If we did entertain the idea that another religion could be truthful, then we are betraying our own faith. Diana Eck discusses this topic in her book, Encountering God. She says, “To recognize this plurality of religious claims as a profoundly important fact of our world does not constitute a betrayal of one’s own faith. It is simply a fact among the many facts that emerge from the historical and comparative study of religion.” Eck, 14. What she is saying, is that when we look at other religions as being truthful, we are not denying the validity of our own, we are evaluating our own beliefs and relating the beliefs of other and of what we hear to what we already know.

Many of the people that we have interviewed agree with this idea. They can take what they have learned about other religions and get something out of it that they otherwise would not have been able to see. Krishna says in the Bhagavad-Gita, “I am in every religion as the thread through a string of pearls. And wherever thou seest extraordinary holiness and extraordinary power brazing and purifying humanity, know ye that I am there.” If we are so narrow-minded as to think that what we already know is the only thing there is to offer, then we are not only becoming more ignorant, but we are actually narrowing our faith and the possibilities of what God can become and how we can be impacted by our faith. As one Hindu said in Eck’s book, “[What kind of stingy God would that be] to show himself only once, to one people, in one part of the world, and so long ago?” We would be small-minded and self-centered to not even consider the idea that this might not be the case.

Our interviewees also agree that challenging what we believe is necessary in establishing what religion we believe in. “We need to acknowledge our own responsibility for the image of God that we are content to believe in.” Eck, 48. This “image of God” that Eck is referring to is our personal religious views of how we see God. Whatever religion someone is, they see the divine in a way that is personal to them. Their personal views are shaped by their religious myths microscopically, the culture they grow up in, and (should be) the pluralistic study of other religions to broaden their telescopic view of the world, society, and other religions.