By Mesha Oh
Sometimes, when he read or heard of news of conflict in the name of religion in various parts of the world, he would wonder how foolish human beings could be. He would muse on the multiplicity of religions, each with their set of truth-claims that set them apart from the rest. If many votaries of the various religions claimed that their religion was the best or truest, it was hardly surprising that conflict in the name of religion had been such a pervasive phenomenon through much of human history.
He had read widely on the history, anthropology, psychology and even economics of religion and knew that there were many social factors involved in shaping people’s religious beliefs and practices. While he was keenly aware of the role of the human hand in the phenomenon of religious multiplicity, he would wonder on how this sociological fact might fit into God’s plan for humankind.
Bringing God into the picture in seeking to make sense of religious plurality, he would surmise that there could be just two possibilities: either that God had Himself arranged for religious plurality to come into being, or that God had permitted human beings to cause religious plurality to come into being by using the freewill that He had given them. He couldn’t think of a third possibility in this regard. With these two possibilities in mind, he was able to connect the fact of God with the fact of religious plurality.
But then the thought would come to him, “If suppose it is that God has Himself arranged for the multiplicity of religions, why did He do so? But, on the other hand, if religious plurality was created not by God Himself but by human beings and God only permitted them to do so, why did He allow them to do that? In either case, God must have known that unscrupulous people would capitalise on the phenomenon of the multiplicity of religions and foment conflict between different sets of religionists that has caused such havoc through much of human history.”
At these why questions, his mind would go blank and he had to admit he could go no further on the basis of his own independent reasoning. There was absolutely no way he could read God’s mind and, therefore, he had to admit that it was simply impossible for him to know just on his own why God had arranged for or permitted (as the case might be) the multiplicity of religions. And so, he had to confess, for him to speculate about these why questions in the hope of getting the right answers was possibly a total waste of time.
But even though he felt there was no way that he could know for sure merely through speculation why God had arranged for or permitted religious plurality that had by taken advantage of by elements to cause enormous conflict down the centuries, his reflections on the phenomenon had led him to an empowering conclusion: that one thing that he did know for sure was that in response to the situation caused by the multiplicity of religions, there were many things that people of goodwill could do to promote goodwill and harmony between people who followed, or claimed to follow, different religions. Despite being unable to know through his own reasoning alone why God had arranged for religious plurality or had permitted human beings to invent it even though this had led to some enormous conflicts, he was convinced that he did know some practical things that he (and others) could do to help build bridges between different groups of religionists and to journey beyond narrow religious particularisms towards God-centric universalism.
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