God Soup

On a warm Friday night last month, I found myself standing on the roof of a building in Jerusalem’s Old City with a group from my university. As the sun was setting behind us and we were chanting a beautiful poem by a 15th century Safed mystic to welcome in Shabbat, the day’s Ramadan fast ended with a bang. As the smoke from the Ramadan cannon evaporated over the Church of the Holy Sepulcher in the Christian quarter, the sounds of hundreds of Yeshiva students singing and dancing towards the Western Wall intermeshed with the Muslim call to prayer over loudspeakers.

At sublime and spiritual moments like this, it is extremely tempting to conclude that all three of these religions are, as the saying goes, “different paths up the same mountain.” To temper an age of profound religious tension—an age of Islamic centers near Ground Zero, convents near Auschwitz, and synagogues in Hebron—many writers and philosophers have argued that all religions, despite their varying rituals, boil down to nothing more than an exhortation to sympathize with the other. Karen Armstrong, for example, noted scholar of religion, argues that all religions began with the simultaneous realization of the golden rule, and the Dalai Lama back in May penned an op-ed in the New York Times in which he asserted that the “strong unifying thread among all the major faiths” is an otherworldly focus on compassion. But as Boston University Professor of Religion Stephen Prothero correctly argues in his book “God is Not One,” this notion not only denies reality, but actually fosters far more misunderstanding than it intends.

The belief that all religions are the same at their core runs not only through religious academia but also popular culture. In the “Lost” series finale, for example, Jack finds himself in a church that features a stained glass window with a crucifix, yin-yang, Star of David, and Islamic crescent and star. A few moments later, Jack’s deceased father appears and tells him that the church is in fact a purgatory in which souls linger before entering the afterlife. All religions, it is implied, will lead one to the same “church” eventually. Similarly, at the end of Dan Brown’s “The Lost Symbol,” Harvard Professor Robert Langdon discovers that all major books of religion feature clues to the “ultimate truth,” that is, the notion that all of humanity is “at-one-ment” with God.

The problem with this pleasant-sounding philosophy, Prothero argues, is that it encourages people to remain ignorant of the genuine differences between religions. It’s not just that different religions provide varying answers to the same question, Prothero asserts, but most religions aren’t even asking the same questions. “Only religions that believe that God is all good ask how a good God can allow millions to die in tsunamis,” he argues, and “only religions that believe in souls ask whether your soul exists before you are born and what happens to it after you die.” Rather than simply positing that all religions point to the same truth, Prothero outlines a pedagogical approach for comparative religion that identifies a problem that each religion is trying to solve, a solution to the problem, a technique for implementing that solution, and exemplars who have already charted the path.

This extremely mature method of examining religion takes the good along with the bad of every belief system and shapes the data into a much more accurate picture than the sanitized version espoused by writers like Armstrong. Take Islam, for example. If compassion lies at the center of Islam just like it does with every religion, as the Dalai Lama argues, then it is extremely hard to fathom why some Muslims would crash airplanes into office buildings or detonate themselves in pizza parlors. Obviously, His Holiness is justified in arguing that fanatics shouldn’t define the whole religion. Indeed, a recent Gallup poll demonstrated that 93 percent of the world’s Muslims are moderate. Still, to deny that radical Islamists do not follow the Prophet as well is to deny reality.

Now take Prothero’s approach. The word “Islam,” he points out, means “submission,” as in total submission to God’s will. But what, exactly, does God want? Does He want His followers to take Koranic verses such as “fight you therefore the friends of Satan” or “believers, fight the unbelievers near you” literally? Is Islamic law like a living constitution, as some Progressive Muslims might argue, or must a Muslim oppose the Western world and live as his forefathers did in the days of early Islam, as the Taliban argues? Such varying interpretations and nuances within the same religion only become apparent when one understands that compassion is far from the only pillar in religiosity.

All of this aside, Prothero does concede that there is one quality that unites all belief systems. “Every religion,” he writes, “asks after the human condition. Here we are in these human bodies. What now? What next? What are we to become?” As I discovered that evening overlooking the Old City, there are times when, in the midst of a beautiful harmony of different races, creeds, and dogmas attempting to achieve transcendence, one can do nothing but stare and wonder. Before the incredible majesty of the universe, we are all naught but flesh and blood.

Avishai D. Don ’12, a Crimson editorial writer, is a social studies concentrator in Adams House currently studying abroad at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. His column appears on alternate Thursdays.