Stephen Prothero on why all religions aren’t, deep down, all the same.
"In his 2007 book, Religious Literacy, Stephen Prothero identified a dangerous contradiction. Americans are not only profoundly religious, but also profoundly uneducated about religion—including their own. The enormous role of religion in contemporary politics means that religious literacy is nothing less than a civic responsibility.
Now, with God Is Not One: The Eight Rival Religions that Run the World—and Why Their Differences Matter, Prothero provides a crash course in Religion 101 for the legions of religious illiterates. Prothero, however, has written much more than a mere textbook. His guide to the world’s eight most important religions is informed by his insistence that religions, rather than offering different paths toward the same truth, begin with different problems and offer different solutions. If this approach appears contentious, it’s because Prothero is entering a public religious debate characterized by absolutist claims. Religion is either wholly terrible, a virus of the mind as Richard Dawkins has characterized it, or mankind’s greatest treasure, because, as Karen Armstrong has written, “Homo sapiens is also Homo religiosus.”
Prothero offers a moment of reasoned calm amidst the mudslinging. If there is to be peace, he argues, we must understand and accept differences, rather than deny them. Informed by this sensitivity to diversity, Prothero finds the divine in the details. The beauty of the world’s religions lies not in their ineffable universality, but in the concrete particularity of their expressions.
.....Why do we have to pretend that Jewish monotheists are saying essentially the same thing as Hindu polytheists and Buddhist nontheists? Let each be what it is—which is to say, recognize that we are bumping up against genuine religious diversity here.
.....The public role of the New Atheists is, in my view, important. Most obviously, they are raising questions about precisely the things many people value most, not least God, Jesus, and the Bible. More urgently, however, they are calling the Religious Right to task. There used to be a gentleman’s agreement that kept both our faith and our doubt out of the public square. After Christians raced into U.S. politics in the 1970s and 1980s, that agreement was breached. Many of the New Atheists are criticizing the God proposition not only because they don’t believe it but also because they object to the conservative political uses to which that proposition has been put. Here too they are advancing the conversation, by pointing out there is a price to pay for enlisting God in political projects."
