God Is Not One: The Eight Rival Religions That Run the World--and Why Their Differences Matter

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Jun 16, 2010 05:46:31

At the dawn of the twenty-first century, dizzying scientific and technological advancements, interconnected globalized economies, and even the so-called New Atheists have done nothing to change one thing: our world remains furiously religious. For good and for evil, religion is the single greatest influence in the world. We accept as self-evident that competing economic systems (capitalist or communist) or clashing political parties (Republican or Democratic) propose very different solutions to our planet's problems. So why do we pretend that the world's religious traditions are different paths to the same God? We blur the sharp distinctions between religions at our own peril, argues religion scholar Stephen Prothero, and it is time to replace naÏve hopes of interreligious unity with deeper knowledge of religious differences.

In Religious Literacy, Prothero demonstrated how little Americans know about their own religious traditions and why the world's religions should be taught in public schools. Now, in God Is Not One, Prothero provides readers with this much-needed content about each of the eight great religions. To claim that all religions are the same is to misunderstand that each attempts to solve a different human problem. For example:

–Islam: the problem is pride / the solution is submission
–Christianity: the problem is sin / the solution is salvation
–Confucianism: the problem is chaos / the solution is social order
–Buddhism: the problem is suffering / the solution is awakening
–Judaism: the problem is exile / the solution is to return to God

Prothero reveals each of these traditions on its own terms to create an indispensable guide for anyone who wants to better understand the big questions human beings have asked for millennia—and the disparate paths we are taking to answer them today. A bold polemical response to a generation of misguided scholarship, God Is Not One creates a new context for understanding religion in the twenty-first century and disproves the assumptions most of us make about the way the world's religions work.

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±1±: Best Buy Overall, I think this book is a great comparative religion text. It is quite sympathetic to each religion it covers, and does a fine job of illustrating the variety within the great religious traditions as well as between those traditions.

Prothero is critical of both wishy-washy feel-good PBS liberals and vitriolic "New Atheists" for over-unifying religion. He is especially hard on the New Atheists. He makes a good case for the fundamental diversity of religion, though there are a couple of instances where he pushes his case too hard. For example, he claims that Christian salvation is unique because it represents freedom from sin (paraphrasing). In my opinion, most Christians and Muslims are after the same thing: an eternal happy existence. That doesn't mean that all religions are after that blissful afterlife, but yes, admittedly, it is a common motivator for many practitioners of religion.

But Prothero doesn't ram his argument down the reader's throat. If anything, he celebrates the diversity of religion. This is what is needed to encourage religious tolerance: enthusiasm for divers ends and means.

I was raised to believe that all religions are essentially one. This was a matter of doctrine in my family. I spent much of my time as a young adult attempting to secure my own belief in that well-meaning doctrine, but that effort ultimately failed, but that's ok, because in studying the world's religions, I found so much more to admire than any white-washed universalist/perrennialist school could offer. Cultural diversity is a good thing. Celebrate it. on Sale!