Thomas,
I'm new to this thread, I picked your message to reply to as a way of replying to many of the posts, both because you launched the thread, and because you articulated many of the ideas I found intriguing.
Thomas said:
Universal Religion
The belief that, since all is God, then only one reality exists, and all religions are simply different paths to that ultimate reality.
Those religions are the 'ways' or as Buddhists might say 'upaya' (a providential means) to that ultmate reality.
OK, although I would like to remind everyone that the term "Universalism" was also used in the 19th Century America for a belief that while not everyone need be
right, they are all
saved! Starr King expressed this by saying that Universalism holds that God is too good and loving to damn anyone, while Unitarians believe that people are too good to be damned. I'm strongly inclined to Universalism in this sense.
Thomas said:
The universal religion can be visualized as a mountain, with many spiritual paths to the summit.
This confuses the mountain with the path, and presupposes the existence of a universal religion, or path, for which we have not one shred of evidence - it is an intellectual construct, the 'visualized as a mountain' has suddenly become a reality. It conforms to a human reason and logic, but still a construct, it is an idea, it is not a reality.
The mountain metaphor is troubling for a number of reasons, especially, I think, because it presumes a single destination, and because it suggests that God is at the end of the journey, not along the path.
It is natural, I suppose, for us to characterize our ultimate hopes as
God's will or
the right way or
nirvana or
heaven. But if we ask each other for practical success criteria in meeting those goals (
What would the world be like if we really succeeded in fulfilling God's will?), I doubt we'd get much consensus. We each have different destinations in mind. Yet the future is built by the accumulative consequences of all of our collective actions. The useful word here is co-creation. We co-create the future. What you do affects my ability to bring about the future that would, to my mind, effect God's will, and vice versa. So to the extent that my path to God depends on achievements here in this universe, I am dependent on your choice of destinations, your choice of paths, and your skill in adhering to that path. Unless I adopt some form of solypsism, in which I am the only being, besides perhaps God, whose choices are relevant to my reaching God, your choice of destination and path (and here the "you" is universal) would seem to be of interest to me.
On the other hand, if God is along the path, not at the end, then my union with God can much more easily be seen to depend on just my choices, not on what I accomplish, since accomplishment depends on everyone else.
The path metaphor might be useful, however, in resolving some of the issues raised in this thread. The problem we face is that our paths are not isolated; they weave in and around each other, especially in cultures as diverse as ours. Some of the paths (or at least some of the people on the paths) express strong intolerance of the paths taken by others.
Of course, there are paths that are antisocial. People that violate the last five of the Ten Commandments, killers, rapists, thiefs, etc, are dangerous at the very least, are surely
wrong in ways most of us could agree on, and
sinful (by some word or other) according to most religions. I take it we need to spend time on this thread arguing whether those paths are on the way of or to God.
What many of us are concerned about is a tendency by some people to characterize us who are one different paths as
ipso facto antisocial, wrong and sinful. Fundamentalists of virtually every stripe call me sinner and hell-bound, even if their words are different, because of my different faith, even though by other reckoning I think myself to be a reasonably good person.
The various flavors of Universalism would seem to have this much in common: the elect are not chosen because of the way they worship but by the love they invest into that worship and into human relations.
Thomas said:
Some are hard; others easy.
This supposes God says "I'll make life a doddle for you over here, but a real trial for you here." One would be obliged to allow such a God to create paths that lead nowhere, or back down to the bottom. We have started by inventing the mountain, now we're making sweeping assumptions about the nature of religion.
...
The point is that there are paths, but there is not a universal path - the many only become one at the peak, not all the way up the mountain.
I don't think I can respond to the wording of this statement in less than half a day of face-to-face conversation. I agree with much, but there seems to be a lot of underlying implications that need to be parsed out.
Nonetheless my brand of Universalism says not that all paths are equal, or that they are all one, but that a path to (or with) God is available to everyone within the framework of their own culture, without the need to import elements of other cultures. Because of the cultural differences, each might adorn the path with language, stories, myths, doctrines, dogmas, rules and principles that differ from one path to another, but that, in and of itself, does not make it wrong.
What is universal is the availability of a path within the culture.
Thomas said:
The universalist path makes as much sense as trying to climb every route up a mountain simultaneously.
This mistakes the issue. No one is expected to climb all paths (though in some of my most mystical moments, I often wonder whether the most terrifying forms of reincarnation would be the theory that there is only one soul --
me -- who has to live every possible life). What the Universalis is saying is that even if your path diverges from mine, whoever your are, you may still travel with (or to) God.
By the way, although I believe your might take you to God, I probably disagree with you on a lot of issues, some factual, some moral, some social and some religious. Which is to say I believe you are mistaken (i.e. wrong) on those issues. I just no longer believe you have to be right on those things to be "right with God".
May our paths intersect in peace,
Jim
