A Metaphor for Religious Pluralism

As I have been moving forward with my life, the question of “Which religion is true?” has become less and less relevant. To me, it is much like asking which type of music is true. While each of us may have particular likes and dislikes when it comes to music, I don’t know that I have ever heard someone declare jazz, classical, rock or any other genre as being the one and only true form of music and reject the rest as invalid. Yet this is exactly how many of us treat religion. I’m sure many of you may protest that religion is not an open subjective experience like music; that it makes definite claims about reality. Christianity claims that Jesus was the Son of God, and the Qu’ran explicitly says that he is not. These cannot both be true. If one is right, then the other is wrong. Perhaps they could both be wrong, but you simply cannot say that they are both equally valid. That would be absurd.

I’ll concede that if that is the way you view the world, then it is absurd. And since this type of binary thinking is the most prevalent way of evaluating truth in our world today, I can hardly blame you. You may not even be aware that there is another way to see things, but there are alternatives.  I’ll present a metaphor as an example. Picture if you will three different works of art from different cultures. One is from Ancient America, another from Egypt, and the last from Africa. All three works of art depict the human form. The Ancient American example has sharp edges; the figure’s head has a square shape, his eye is huge, and his limbs are stocky. The African example has flowing lines, elongated shapes, and is very sparse on details such as fingers, toes, and joints. And Egyptian art has a character all its own. Proportions are often slightly off; the vantage point is almost always from the side, and people are often surrounded with symbols meant to identify them and their position.

These examples are all very different. None of them are a perfect depiction of what a human being looks like, yet when we see any one of these paintings, we do not wonder if it is a strange, foreign creature. Nor do we think that the creatures in the paintings are three completely different species. We immediately recognize each of them as being a person. Why? Because each of us have seen a real human being and are familiar enough with it that we can recognize its likeness in a variety of forms even when it is stylized or distorted.    

Now imagine an alien from another planet were to view the same paintings, but has never seen a human or visited our planet. What would it think of them? Perhaps the absurdity of the figures would prompt him to question whether or not they represented real creatures at all. If they were real creatures, certainly they were three distinct ones. After all, the first one has very long arms, the second very short and stubby. One has large teeth, the other has none. If these paintings are showing the same creature, then one has to be right and the other wrong. After all, could the creature could have teeth AND not have teeth at the same time. That would just be ridiculous.

We might see another reaction from an ancient inhabitant of Egypt who had never left their country and had little or no familiarity with art from other cultures. While he would recognize the subject as being a person, he would object to the way it was portrayed. He would see the Egyptian way of painting as being the right way to paint, and this new form as being a distorted or inferior attempt to paint a person.  

You may think that it takes crazy mental gymnastics to claim that multiple religious traditions are equally valid, but it is no more difficult than being able to accept these three different artworks as equally valid ways of depicting the human form. If you have had genuine spiritual experiences that have occurred outside the framework of a particular religion, it becomes easy for you to accept the Bible, the Qu’ran, the Bhagavadgita, and the Dhammapada as all being the word of God without any sense of irony. This is because you have ‘seen’ God, so to speak, and you immediately recognize Him as the subject the artists were trying to paint. You are not bothered that the artist’s stylistic choices or limited technical ability prevented him from creating a perfectly accurate depiction. In fact, you may even find these unique characteristics to be endearing. You are also not concerned that one artist’s depiction of God paints Him differently than another. You even may find that the way certain features are exaggerated in one painting helps you to appreciate things that you never noticed in the other painting. Ultimately, you compare each religion vertically rather than horizontally. That is, you are concerned with how a religion connects an individual to God rather than worrying about how each religion fits with each other.