God Is Not One: The Eight Rival Religions That Run the World Read Online Free PDF Page A

ordering these rivals in terms of contemporary impact, I have obviously been influenced by my own biases. I have tried, however, to be fair. While in Jerusalem researching this book, I struck up a conversation with an elderly Muslim. When I told him I was writing a book on the world’s religions, he looked at me sternly, pointed a finger in my direction, and instructed me to be honest. “Do not write false things about the religions,” he said. Religious Studies scholars are rarely honest enough to admit this in person, much less in print, but we all know there are things that each of the world’s religions do well, and things they do poorly. If you want to help the homeless, you will likely find the Christian Social Gospel more useful than Hindu notions of caste. If you want to find techniques for quieting the mind through bodily exercises, you will likely find Hindu yogis more useful than Christian saints.
    But being honest also requires being true to these religious traditions themselves—by writing chapters to which adherents can say “Amen” and otherwise wrestling with the fact that in writing about any religion, one is treading on dreams. While researching this book, I repeatedly came across respected scholars of Hinduism and Buddhism referring to “sin” and “salvation” as if these were Hindu and Buddhist concepts. 22 But these are Christian ideas, so when writing about Hinduism and Buddhism, I will not use them. For similar reasons, I will not refer to the Muslims’ Paradise or the Buddhists’ nirvana as heaven. Similarly, I do not assume here that scripture is as important to Hindus as it is to Protestants, or that it is used in a similar way. The Vedas are the Hindus’ most sacred scriptures, but hardly any Hindu gives a fig about their content; as almost any Hindu can tell you, what matters are their sounds, and the sacred power these sounds convey. Neither do I assume, as many Protestants do, that religions are about faith and belief. Religions cannot be reduced to “belief systems” any more than they can be reduced to “ritual systems.” Belief is a part of most religions, but only a part, and in most cases not the most important part. (You can be a Jew without believing in God, for example.) So while I will refer to Protestants as “believers” and to their religion as a “faith,” I do not refer to religious people in general as “believers” or to their traditions as “faith-based.”
    There is a long tradition of Christian thinkers assuming that salvation is the goal of all religions and then arguing that only Christians can achieve this goal. Huston Smith, who grew up in China as a child of Methodist missionaries, rejected this argument but not its guiding assumption. “To claim salvation as the monopoly of any one religion,” he wrote, “is like claiming that God can be found in this room and not the next.” 23 It might seem to be an admirable act of empathy to assert that Confucians and Buddhists can be saved. But this statement is confused to the core, since salvation is not something that either Confucians or Buddhists seek. Salvation is a Christian goal, and when Christians speak of it, they are speaking of being saved from sin. But Confucians and Buddhists do not believe in sin, so it makes no sense for them to try to be saved from it. And while Muslims and Jews do speak of sin of a sort, neither Islam nor Judaism describes salvation from sin as its aim. When a jailer asks the apostle Paul, “What must I do to be saved?” (Acts 16:30), he is asking not a generic human question but a specifically Christian one. So while it may seem to be an act of generosity to state that Confucians and Buddhists and Muslims and Jews can also be saved, this statement is actually an act of obfuscation. Only Christians seek salvation.
    A sports analogy may be in order here. Which of the following—baseball, basketball, tennis, or golf—is best at scoring runs? The answer of course is