Questions about God: Don't assume all religions offer similar answers

And religion remains a major motivator in Kashmir, where two nuclear powers, the Hindu-majority state of India and the Muslim-majority state of Pakistan, remain locked in an ancient territorial dispute with palpable religious overtones. Our understanding of these battlefields is not advanced one inch by the dogma that “all religions are one.”

While I do not believe we are witnessing a “clash of civilizations” between Christianity and Islam, it is a fantasy to imagine that the world’s two largest religions are in any meaningful sense the same, or that interfaith dialogue between Christians and Muslims will magically bridge the gap.

Different solutions to different problems

The world’s religious rivals are clearly related, but they are more like second cousins than identical twins. They do not teach the same doctrines. They do not perform the same rituals. And they do not share the same goals.

For example, in Christianity the problem is sin, the solution (or goal) is salvation, the technique for achieving salvation is some combination of faith and good works, and the exemplars who chart this path are the saints in Catholicism and Orthodoxy and ordinary people of faith in Protestantism.

And in Buddhism the problem is suffering, the solution (or goal) is nirvana, the technique for achieving nirvana is the Noble Eightfold Path, which includes such classic Buddhist practices as meditation and chanting, and the exemplars who chart this path are arhats (for Theravada Buddhists), bodhisattvas (for Mahayana Buddhists), or lamas (for Vajrayana Buddhists).

One of the most common misconceptions about the world’s religions is that they plumb the same depths, ask the same questions.

They do not.

Stephen Prothero is a professor of religion at Boston University, specializing in American religions. This essay is excerpted and adapted from his new book, “God Is Not One: The Eight Rival Religions That Run the World – and Why Their Differences Matter.” Copyright © 2010 by Stephen Prothero. Used with permission of HarperOne, an imprint of HarperCollins Publishers.

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