Religious pluralism and its definition
Clyde pointed out an important feature of the word “pluralism” in my earlier post. It’s a slippery term. When someone uses it, they can mean the fact that in a given society there exist a multiplicity of religions together. This, Clyde argues, is better understood as diversity (some use the word “plurality”, too). Pluralism could also mean that those diverse religions not only coexist, but support and have an attitude of toleration one another’s liberties. Another way to understand religious pluralism is a specific philosophical approach to the sheer existence of many religions (the fact of diversity mentioned earlier). John Hick, for example, has made this use of the term famous through his writings.
As a member of a Unitarian Universalist congregation, in which we value the fact of religious diversity, and attempt to have a practical ethic of tolerance, I am concerned that we not neglect the third issue. Philosophy and religion share (if I may state this so broadly) a common approach to the world. Trent highlighted this in his comment to my misguided rant. They start with questions.
Why is the world a place of suffering?
Why is there something instead of nothing?
How should I act towards people who hurt me?
What am I doing here, and where did I come from?
The question that my small seminar will undertake to examine is: Why are there more religions than just one?
Certainly one answer is, “Because that’s the way it is–now let’s get onto the business of tolerance.” Hold on, my friends. What if we want to “appropriate” from various religions what we value, and bring them together into our own faith, oriented at something entirely different from their original contexts, perhaps? It seems like we’re implicitly saying that all religions have something of “truth” in them (I’m still drafting up a post on that term). By what means, aside from our personal likes and dislikes, are we going to judge where they make contact with reality?
Yes, Unitarian Universalism believes in experience as a touchstone. But we do not so value individual experience that we will turn an entire congregation upside down because someone has a vision giving them a unique revelation.
Are we going to take, piecemeal, from religious texts and practices, those which seem to agree with one another? Okay–but we’re mostly left with some form of the Golden Rule and a very vague ethical precept. Too, we’re probably going to have to leave the god-question to the side, since you’ll never get traditions to agree there.
What if we’re implying instead that none of these religions have genuine contact with reality, and they are human projections, a response to reality rather than something given to them by a transcendent revelation? Then it seems that our UU religious tradition (or my individual practice thereof) is “the truth.” Humanist skepticism is true, and the religions of the world are false, though pretty.
I’m putting these options out there as semi-caricatures to show the intractability of this conundrum and to show that your response to the plurality of religions is necessarily tied to some implicit understanding of why there is more than one.
It’s not a bad thing to have an implicit understanding. I just happen to think that dragging some of our assumptions into the light can be helpful. It may turn out that the skeptics stay skeptical, the pragmatists stay pragmatic, the inclusivists stay inclusivist, and the panentheists stay panentheist. Fine. But I think that not only can we learn from engaging with the areas of conflict (direct and implied) between religions, the areas of overlap (or gaps, where there is silence), we can learn from each other’s stance towards them.
This is why I’m undertaking what I am. It might blow up in my face–I’m taking on quite a lot, hoping for good discussion (I’ve created a set of questions to frame each class). The initial curriculum is available on my web portal. Readings are a combination of photocopies and typed text, and are not available yet. Further handouts will probably be produced to accompany each session and posted online as well.