I would agree with the Professor. Respecting another religion does not mean "beneficently granting" that it agrees with your own and does the same thing. It means that we allow it to speak to us about what is important to its own essence not ours. The deeper question is whether or not we can abide in our own faith without insisting that others convert or somehow get shoe horned into our own view of salvation.

I think he makes a good point. I've been to a few interreligious dialogs where it felt like everyone was in favor of religions, and no one espoused a religion.

I believe it's equally arrogant (and "above our pay-grade") to assert EITHER that "all rivers (of religion) run to the sea)/all paths ascend to the same mountaintop" *OR* "each (or "MY"!) faith is absolutely unique" (or, qua Karl Barth re Christianity, "uniquely not a religion at all").

We simply do NOT have God's Point-of-View to know, either way.

I think it's fine to (subjectively!) observe commonality, or difference. But one should keep some humility about one's conclusions.

JC Fisher

The most helpful inter-religious experiences for me have been in contexts where each faith is able to express itself in its unique perspective and forms. The most unhelpful have attempted to put together some kind of hybrid or amalgem which nourishes no one...

Ironically, a faithful member of another tradition invariably teaches me more about being a faithful Christian than the "I'm a bit of everything" crowd...

Long way of my saying, "Hear, hear!"

The experiment, experience, and Poetic Genius of which the persona of Blake's poem speaks exceed any thesis on religion. Poetry both is and is not religion, even in a poem which bathes in religion.

Truth is not the point of this particular poem.

Experiment may be related to truth but it also suspends it because it is to repeated and is thus only provisional. And even while the text suggests some kind of authentic experience, its citation of religious language abandons authenticity. One is abandoned to the act/experience of reading and the necessity of rereading--as if one will never get it anyway.

To say all religions are one may mean no more than that all are social constructs or that the persona who says this merely approves of what is good in each of them.

Anglicanism at its best has always been open to aesthetics and the arts.

Gary Paul Gilbert

Most comments seem to agree that all religions are not the same but seem to assume that, whatever differences, they are all of equal value and truth or, as my friend Gary likes to put it, just different social constructs of a basic theme. In other words, what ever meets your needs is just fine.

I would respectfully and humbly disagree. Ethical codes may be similar but Christianity claims and believes that the eternal God revealed itself most fully by taking on human flesh and dwelling among us as Jesus the Christ.

You can't get much better than that. Every other religion pales in comparison to that outrageously arrogant claim about Jesus that is of the essence of the Christian faith and that drives the evangelical compulsion to share that good news and convert others.

What we Episcopalians need to do is stop apologizing and start evangelizing.

Paul,

The only distinction I would make in response to your comment is that while I feel we are compelled to energetically (I would hope joyously!) share the good news of God in Christ in word and deed, I believe it is the Spirit that converts.

I find this distinction helpful, because if I take on the responsibility of converting others, I assume an arrogant control of outcomes -- not to mention knowledge of the heart of another.

If a reality greater than the physical world exists, which I believe there is, then it seems to me that all people, regardless of geography or culture, must be able to apprehend or to experience that reality. Most religion is an effort to “package” that experience. Prothero’s comments speak to the outward expressions of that packaging: ritual, narrative and scripture, doctrine. All of that packaging reduces to finite, human language that which is inherently irreducible. In other words, he emphasizes religion and not the ultimate. With respect to religion – the human packaging of the ultimate – Prothero is correct. However, his comments might shed more insight if he distinguished between religion and the ultimate.

Paul, I did not say that all religions are social constructs of the same basic theme. One would need to define "religion" and "same." I find the question of whether all religions are the same as about as meaningless as whether reality is one or multiple. Fortunately, philosophers who have dared to affirm or negate these doctrines have gone on to explain themselves and inevitably qualify their terms. Most philosophers today have abandoned such an approach.

My point was that Professor Prothero does to Blake what he accuses Karen Armstrong and the Dalai Lama of doing to religion. He reduces Blake to a common theme. Poetry is quoted only as a support for his argument. He uses Blake but fails to read him, perhaps because, for his own ideological purposes, he has to associate Billy Blake with the Hippie movement of forty years ago. Blake gets framed as a Hippie. The rhetoric is unmistakably rightwing because the author goes out of his way to attack the so-called counterculture movement of forty years ago, as if it were a threat to anyone today.

Perhaps Prothero understands that poetry and literature, and perhaps religion, are drugs which need to be dosed just right.

Gary Paul Gilbert

Every other religion pales in comparison to that outrageously arrogant claim about Jesus that is of the essence of the Christian faith and that drives the evangelical compulsion to share that good news and convert others. What we Episcopalians need to do is stop apologizing and start evangelizing.

I'm sorry, Paul W, but that does not sound like Good News to me.

JC Fisher

Allowing people to find commonalities between religions affords common ground, meaning we can feel true empathy for people of different faiths. It's human nature, and it's easier to identify with others when we think we have something universal in common. Regardless of whether or not those parallels really exist, I think it's more dangerous to humanity to try and take that "sentiment" away.

Kate Haralson

"Christianity claims and believes that the eternal God revealed itself most fully by taking on human flesh and dwelling among us as Jesus the Christ. You can't get much better than that. Every other religion pales in comparison to that outrageously arrogant claim about Jesus..."

And Hindus believe the Eternal God also took on flesh a number of times--most notably as Rama, Krishna, and the Buddha--and still does. The "still does" part is pretty outrageously arrogant, and sounds like Good News to me. Likewise, various schools of Mahayana Buddhism have an experience of the Bodhisattva of Great Compassion in various incarnations, from the Dalai Lama to the ancient Prince Shotoku, to the 13th Cent. Pure Land teacher Shinran. Sounds pretty audacious, outrageous and wonderful to me.

None of these traditions are trying to get anyone to the same place or get the same thing done in the same way, that's for sure. And that's excellent.

I think the outrageous claim of Christianity is that Jesus is the sole incarnation of God, for all time and forever. Well how the hell does anyone know that??? God couldn't possibly bless anyone else..surely not. God couldn't possibly walk the earth among other people, that's just impossible.

Really??

If my objection takes me beyond the pale and into the heretic's pyre, then so be it.