Celebrating Religious Diversity

PRAISE THE LORD. Praise the universe, human nature, our differing perspectives on life, our inability or refusal to agree on very much. For without these things, our celebrated cultural diversity would not be possible. Not everyone, however, celebrates cultural diversity, nor diversity of any sort. These people, those disinclined to celebrate diversity, we call conservatives. The more conservative the beholder, the more the tendency to desire to maintain or impose rigid cultural conformity, religiously, ethnically, attitudinally, politically, the whole works. In the United States,this desire manifests as white, Christian, heterosexual, capitalistic conservatism. This is to a great extent the heritage of Amerian culture, a culture which despite its best effforts has not been able to exclude diverse populations. The prevailing trend,heaven be thanked, is for increasing acceptance of diversity in all its myriad forms. The precise number of organized religions in the world is diffficult to ascertain, but numbers in the thousands. Would the world be a better place if every human on he planet embraced the same religion, with a unniversally agreed upon dogma and theology? In the first place, such a state of affairs is almost impossible to imagine. Only the most extreme form of political and religious authoritarian control could even hope to bring it about. What is almost impossible to imagine is a universal church without the minor disputes and resultant fragmentation to which they ultimately lead. And even if such a situation adhered, wouldn't the world be a far less interesting place? When the little old Christian lady at the senior center told me in no uncertain terms that the only way to approach God is through the savior Jesus Christ, I instantly recoiled. I replied that that is true for her, but that for billions of other people, it isn't. It was her turn to recoil in horror. By rejecting my comment, she was, it seems obvious to me, rejecting a basic, verifiable, obvious reality. Her presumed belief that the world's billions of Muslims and Hindus are not truly approaching and revering God, and that therefore they will spend an unsaved eternity in torment in hell,relegates her to the realm of evil, in my view, and destroys all possibility of accurately desribing her as a "good person", despte her sweet, pleasant personality.Her contention that there is only one God would likely find disagreement among the Hindu population. Most disconcerting of all is the fact that there are billons of people, people of all religious faiths, who share her attitude, what seems to me a poisonous, toxic attitude. It is almost but not quite beyond my comprehension why people like that don't simply accept the reality that there are as many approaches to God, as many ways of revering and adoring cosmic creation and its creator, not only as there are religious traditions, but as there are people doing the adoring and revering. Her way of approaching God is her way, but not everyone's way. How simple, how obvious. The answer, I think, lies in human nature and psychology, in our ceaselss, urgent need to reaffirm ourselves by imposing our views on our environment, our environment being other people. Whatver we do,is t eems, we can'twin. Either we create an accept to universal, global religion and church, or we spend a seeming eternity embroiledin conflict of sundry sorts, including religiou. But maybe there is another answer, another way of succeeding as intelligent beings. A universal system of not only exploring and understanding the universe and ourelves,but of revering it in humble admiration and adoration. Let's call it science.