1.1 What is religion?  (Page 3/6)

While this approach has the virtues of frankness and simplicity, it is also true that it leads to a fanaticism and a disregard for the rights of others that would no doubt have horrified the founder of the religion in question. This strategy seems most common among monotheists, that is, Jews, Christians and Muslims. But is by no means restricted to them: Even in Buddhism, usually the most tolerant of religions, you will find schools of thought that deny that any other schools teach the true words of the Buddha.. Also, many monotheists reject this approach - they cannot see how a loving God would allow deception on such a massive scale to happen, considering the results for all concerned.

A more subtle variation of this strategy is to declare that all religions have a certain amount of truth in them, but mine happens to be the completely fulfilled truth, which has emerged after a long evolution - the older schools have been corrupted by human misunderstanding of the initially flawless revelation. Alternatively, if this is not yet the case, my religion is at least the closest approach to this complete truth that will be revealed in the fullness of time.

This strategy has long been a favourite among Hindus and Buddhists, but it seems also to have taken root in certain sectors of twentieth-century Christianity: one thinks here of Raimundo Pannikar's phrase "The unknown Christ of Hinduism". One can also see elements of it in the Islamic concept of the "people of the Book". But while this approach may be more refined and humane than the fundamentalist one, it is imperialistic in nature. It refuses to take other people and their beliefs seriously, preferring instead to remake them in its own image.

The Baha'i Faith refines the concept even further: they declare that each major religion was taught by its founder in a way appropriate to its time and place. Therefore, the most recent revelation is the one most appropriate to us, and those of us who prefer to cling to an older faith are not exactly wrong, but maybe a little old-fashioned in a "stick-in-the-mud" kind of way. As a result, Bahai's tend not to evangelise their beliefs aggressively: as far as they are concerned the better fit of their own teachings to our times will eventually become so blindingly obvious that people will naturally turn towards it. Until then, those who stick to other religions will be saved by them, if with more difficulties than is really necessary. We have come a long way from a simplistic fundamentalism here, but there is nevertheless an evolutionary line from the one to the other extreme.

The second major way to react to the problem of the differences between religions is to declare that the only true religion is mysticism. Mysticism may be defines as a process whereby the mystic plumbs the depths of the self and reality in a radical process of meditative self-discovery to discover the true nature of reality. And the sayings of mystics of all kinds of different traditions show that they have known very similar experiences. Therefore, the true unity of religion can be found in mystical experience. In mysticism, we can find the "perennial philosophy", the common ground of all religious experience. All the rest of religion, the ceremonies, the scriptures, the deeply-held beliefs, are reduced to a kind of life-support system for mysticism.