BSR 6: All Religions Lead to the Same Place

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Do Hinduism, Buddhism, and Christianity all take you to the same place?

(These Bite-Size Replies are responses to “Quick Shots,” brief Christian responses to atheist challenges. The introduction to this series is here.)

Challenge to the Christian: All religions lead to the same place.

Christian response #1: Some mushrooms are good for you, and some are toxic. The same applies to religious worldviews.

The mushroom/religion analogy won’t illustrate your argument until you show that the points of comparison are valid. Yes, some mushrooms are healthy and others not. Why conclude from that that some religions are true and others not? Maybe they’re all wrong.

Don’t send someone on a quest to sift through religions, looking for the ones that are spiritually okay to eat and avoiding the ones that are toxic, before you’ve shown that any are okay to eat. Scientology and Mormonism are just pretend. And Baha’i and Shinto. Why imagine that Christianity is the lone exception? The burden of proof is yours.

Religions aren’t like mushrooms, with some good and some bad. They’re more like snakebites. Some are very poisonous and some are not, but none are good for you. [Click to tweet]

Christian response #2: “The major religious worldviews disagree far more than they agree. They could all be wrong, or one of them could be right.”

Don’t look at just the handful of major religions. Consider the entire landscape, both throughout the breadth of human societies today as well as throughout human history. Human society has invented religions by the thousands. The “just one of them could be right” option looks a lot less likely.

You’re right that there’s a lot of disagreement between religions. They can’t even agree on the number of gods, the name(s) of the gods, or how to placate them. The primary debate isn’t Christianity vs. atheism. The first order of business is for believers in the supernatural to get their own house in order, and your argument about religious diversity emphasizes this point.

I’m no Christian, so I’m happy to dismiss “all roads lead to God” pantheism. Religions continue to fragment, making clear that there’s no supernatural force nudging humanity toward a single cosmic truth. This fragmentation is a problem for Christianity, too. If Christians can’t unify, it’s obvious that the Bible delivers no single, unambiguous message.

Human society invents religions by the thousands. Why imagine that just one (your favorite) is correct? Far likelier is that they’re all inventions. [Click to tweet]

(The Quick Shot I’m replying to is here.)

Continue to BSR 7: If God Existed, He Wouldn’t Be so Hidden

For further reading:

So here we are moving toward the exit of the twentieth century
with a religious community largely adjusted to the status quo,
standing as a tail-light behind other community agencies
rather than a headlight leading men to higher levels of justice.
— Martin Luther King,
“Letter From Birmingham Jail” (1963)

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Image from Mike Scott, CC license
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