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spirituality
Do all religions lead to the same goal?
Are all religious and spiritual people climbing different paths up the same mountain? Do all rivers merge in the one same sea? Many feel this to be an inherent truth of human experience.
Others feel that the distinctiveness of each religion cannot be so easily dismissed and worry that 'interfaith' encourages a movement towards one world religion, actually cancelling out religious diversity rather than celebrating it.
At the Parliament of World Religions
in Chicago in 1893, Swami Vivekananda said that ‘To the Hindu,
the whole world of religions is only a travelling, a coming up of different
men and women through various conditions and circumstances to the same
goal.’
William James made a similar claim in his book The Varieties
of Religious Experience written in 1902: ‘In Hinduism,
in Neoplatonism, in Sufism, in Christian mysticism, ... we find the
same recurring note, so that there is about mystical utterances an eternal
unanimity.’
This supposition - that at the heart of every religion there is a similar underlying experience of the Divine - influenced many of the pioneers of interfaith work, although it has also been widely questioned. Aldous Huxley defined this belief or perennial philosophy as ‘the metaphysic that recognises a divine Reality substantial to the world of things and lives and minds: the psychology that finds in the soul something similar to, or even identical with, divine Reality; the ethic that places man’s final end in the knowledge of the immanent and transcendent Ground of all being - the thing is immemorial and universal.’
The Hindu philosopher, Dr Sarvepalli Radhakrishnan (1888-1975), said, ‘The seers describe their experiences with an impressive unanimity. They are near to one another on mountains farthest apart.’
What do you think? How has your life shaped your thoughts and feelings about the goal of religious and spiritual life?
One example often quoted to support the view that all religions lead to the same goal is the religious experience of Ramakrishna Paramahansa, a 19th century Indian Hindu mystic.
A critic of this view is Prof Keith Ward, Regius Professor of Divinity at Oxford University.
Follow the links toRamakrishna and Keith Ward and read both the texts. Have either influenced your own opinion at all? If so, how? What might be the religious consequences of either position? Do you think one rather than the other is most helpful for interfaith work? Why?
Contents |Introduction |Religious Goals |Mystical Experience |Testing the Theory |Cave of the Heart | Inter-monastic Dialogue | Interfaith Worship | Is interspirituality possible| Questions | Inspiration | Resources | Weblinks
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interfaith organisations network 2003 |