I was just chatting with someone earlier today and the issue of religious dogmas surfaced again. A few days ago a couple of high profile terrorist attacks took place in Britain, in London and Glasgow, Following the Glasgow one (a couple of twenty-something medical doctors loaded up an SUV with petrol and crashed into the Glasgow airport), a couple of medical doctors from the middle east were detained in Brisbane. Both were working as doctors in a Gold Coast hospital, both are Muslims with one of them having Palestinian parents and was himself born in Jordan. He may have been an Indian. Anyway, we were talking about this piece of news and someone remarked why so much violence emanates from religions. Someone else retorted that was because religions create bigotry, especially religions which insist they are right and everyone else is wrong. Exclusivity is always a bad idea for societies trying to find ways to live together more harmoniously.
That is a problem isn’t it – the world insisting no one should be dogmatic and claim exclusive ownership over truth. Religions, in my mind, are necessarily dogmatic. Why set down principles of relating to God and the consequential rules for this and the after life, if you don’t believe them to be true? In fact you shouldn’t just believe them to be true you have to believe they are the only ones which are true. If you don’t, if others are also true, why start something new? Why not just use the other, pre-existing one? After all, one isn’t talking about building a better model of say, a car or a computer or a phone, because newer or better models of those tools make those tools even more effective. Essentially a car is to get you from point A to point B and you make a newer model only because it brings you from point A to point B either faster, or in more comfort or safer or using less fuel. You don’t make a new car for any other reason, do you? Or maybe you do but surely that is just consumerism gone mad (as in having fifty varieties of margarine on the supermarket shelves) and has nothing to do with making sure you get from point A to point B, because the old beat-up whatever does exactly that already.
My point is, when one starts a new religion, surely the motivation must be the idea that all the other religions don’t bring you to God, that some aspects of their teachings are not quite right with the result that you may not reach God? Man seeking God isn’t exactly like finding different ways to eat chocolates and that discovering another way is always a plus. If religion A already lets you find God, you don’t start religion B unless A didn’t actually let you find God. If merely parts of A were problematic but you still got to God anyway, wouldn’t religion B then be false if it didn’t contain those bits of A which did get you to God? And if A did get you to God, shouldn’t those problematic bits be fixed but didn’t matter anyway because you still got to God via A? Why start B? I’d be pretty disappointed with a God who doesn’t have a set of standards, for whom anything goes. If God wants us to come to Him, He’d set down a way and that’d be it. I guess I’m trying to say truth in religion is necessarily exclusive. If A is true then everything else must be false. If there’s something else which is true, then A must have been false. I’ve heard this described as an “either or” principle, as opposed to a “both and” principle. I think my point is especially focused if you agree that often, A and B actually say very different things. So, they cant be both right and they cant both get you to God. I guess you can call me an “either or” person and if that makes me a religiously dogmatic exclusionist bigot, well…that’s not so nice but I guess I’m in that sense, one.
Ante 