During late high school and then college years, I went through a deep and sincere struggle with what I believed about the world. I had seen some convincing elements in Christianity, but I was also deeply troubled by literal interpretations of Genesis (among other books like Jonah), various aspects of Christian over-proof (dismissing challenging questions with pithy and weak answers), and the general complexity of understanding the ancient world, which apparently isn’t a part of the training most pastors receive. Nobody really wanted to address my questions, either, which didn’t help.
I never sat down with all the world religions as if searching for the right one, and I certainly didn’t believe I could just choose whatever I wanted, as if objective truth doesn’t exist, but in an effort to expand my understanding, I found several of the key religious texts of the world. There was a Mormon bookstore not far from my high school, so I remember sheepishly going over there and buying a copy of the Book of Mormon, bundled with some of the other texts, feeling very out-of-place since I wasn’t actually Mormon. But they didn’t gun me down for being a fraud 😉 [I still smile remembering how intimidated I felt, though!]. Some time later I found a copy of the Bhagavad Gita in a thrift store, and I also bought the Koran from Barnes and Noble. I ordered the Gathas of Zarathustra from Amazon.
This was all good and well for trying to understand other religions, but I still remember one of my roommates in college, sophomore year, seeing all these books and saying, “Why do you have these?!” And I replied, “So I can understand them”, which was met with not much of a response.
Although I’m no longer connected to that roommate, it’s not my intention to beat up on him, either. Quite frankly, that’s the attitude many Christians have toward other religions, and I think that’s very unfortunate. I still remember eating at a restaurant in Estes Park and seeing a flyer for a church: “Christians only! No Jew, Muslims, or Hindus. Christians only!” Wow, way to miss the message!
Too often, Christians treat other religions as enemies. I find this amusing, as I thought the passage about our struggle being not against flesh and blood to be pretty clear, but I guess not. There’s this sentiment that competing ideas are the same as opposition, which is kind of fascinating, but that’s not something you would react strongly to unless you felt threatened by it. It’s somewhat similar to how hostile some Christians are toward evolution, though evolution is only a threat if you believe in the strict, perfectly literal interpretation of the Bible, which is quite out of touch with how literature actually works, and I think has more to do with poor teaching and tradition than anything else, but it took me years to settle on that conclusion. People really find ways to hate others who have different views.
Also fascinating is how Christians will reject other religions outright, without truly understanding what those religions say. We talk about the Bible, forgetting that we’ve known it our entire lives, then throw other texts out after reading them for a few days, simply because one or two passages sound stupid. Or we relegate our understanding to books by people like Ravi Zacharias who, while knowledgeable, become shortcuts for our understanding, rather than actual paths toward it. X religion is wrong because so-and-so said Y about it! I’m smart, I know what I’m talking about!
Of course, then you have the other types of people who have “read” the Koran, done absolutely no scholarly study on in, and drone on about how wrong it is, simply because they read into it exactly what they expected.
Granted, religions can be extremely burdensome. Before leaving Nepal, I stocked up on books about Buddhism, a religion I’ve never studied in depth, and am finally starting to understand it. But the Buddhist “canon” of scriptures is a rather deep topic, as the different schools of Buddhism were never truly unified, and since the Buddha himself never wrote down his stuff, we don’t actually see writings until several hundred years later, and not all of the texts are very consistent. Just do a search for “Pali Canon” and check out the image on the wikipedia page. If you thought the Christian Bible was long, check out those volumes! Just insane. But the different traditions also follow different writings, so that’s not even the whole corpus of potential Buddhist texts.
But even if you spent your time attacking other religions, you’d be missing the deeper point: the people. People are not just numbers to convert. They are not “backward” just because they were born into a different culture or religion or customs. And some of them, yes, are smarter than you.
In the midst of understanding other religions, I don’t think this means we can’t make our own conclusions: it simply means we should be careful. I get the feeling that Buddhism lays an absolutely crushing burden on people. Everything is always out of grasp, the answer for lack of understanding seems to be more and more readings, and you, the student, are always the idiot, while all of these dead masters, who had different styles, personalities, and biases, have all the answers, and if you don’t understand them, it’s because you are just trapped by samsaric confusion, or whatever. Ya big dummy.
Now, it’s not necessarily fair to judge the entire religion by these impressions, given how much I still don’t understand, but these impressions still mean something, and I don’t believe that Buddhism is true. But the point is, I’m putting time and effort into understanding it better, if for no other reason than to be able to respect the practitioners more and understand their values and life systems. And not everybody will be especially interested in doing this, nor is it strictly necessary, but I find Christians who have read this stuff and wholly dismissed it to be rather glib and disrespectful at times. During my time in Nepal, I always tried to walk around manis clockwise, not because I believe in Buddhism, but because doing so was the respectful thing to do.
I wish there were healthy bridges toward understanding these religions, that give them a fair crack, so to speak, or which can present the details in a way that we understand the details of the Bible. There have been tons of analyses of the dates of Christian manuscripts and authorship, for example, but very little in the West is known or well-communicated about the texts for, say, Buddhism or Islam, at least that I have seen. In the way that we understand Biblical Studies, it would be valuable to understand things in a similar way for Buddhist Studies, which is a field that does actually exist, but is kind of rare and obscure, at least in the English-speaking world.
I don’t know exactly where I’m going with this.
[After re-reading this, I want to note that definitely not all Christians are mean toward other religions, but a lot are. I’m venting a bit in this post, though I try really hard not to be one of those guys who thinks the church is just awful and horrible because it gets a few things wrong. More like, the vindictive types are fairly common and are a problem, but I know we are all flawed]