Schmidt-Leukel - Religious pluralism and interreligious dialogue : the Gifford lectures : an extended edition

RELIGIOUS PLURALISM

It is uncontroversial that our planet hosts a wide range of religious traditions, and people have never ever been more aware of the actual extent of this diversity than today. What is controversial is how one should interpret religious diversity and deal with it. This has become a challenge to the religions themselves. Within each of the major religions we find a range of different approaches to religious diversity, both in terms of how to understand it doctrinally and how to relate to it practically. The first half of this book deals with one set or type of approaches, the one that I call pluralist. When I use the terms pluralist or religious pluralism, I am not referring to the fact of religious plurality or religious diversity but rather to a particular interpretation of religious diversity. Religious pluralism designates a specific theory and evaluation of religious diversity. This theory first assumes that religious truth existsand in a sense must existin a diversity of forms, which are then assessed as equally valid despite their being different. Religious pluralism, as used in this book, is not simply an interpretation of religious diversity, but it is itself a religious interpretation. This interpretation, as I argue, can be developed only from within the different religious traditions. In the of this book, I focus on the developments of pluralist approaches in Christianity, Judaism, Islam, Hinduism, Buddhism, and the Chinese religions. But before I go into the particularities of pluralist approaches within these religious traditions, I would like to begin by making some remarks about the rationale and general features of religious pluralism.

Humans have apparently been religious right from their early evolutionary beginnings and there is obviously more than just one religion in the world. Both of these facts call for some explanation. To the atheist or naturalist the phenomenon of religion is largely a product of delusion and deceit. It is, for example, interpreted as a relic from the early childhood of humanity, when humanity had not yet risen to a rational understanding and exploration of reality (Auguste Comte). Or it is seen as a phenomenon of human self-estrangement, as a projection of human ideals and fears on some imagined supernatural being (Ludwig Feuerbach); or as a projection of psychological (Sigmund Freud), social (mile Durkheim), and economical (Karl Marx) structures reflecting human ideals and values, or feelings of lostness and guilt, or various power mechanisms in society and human reactions to them. In more recent days, religion has also been explained as the result of an in-built neurological structure supposed to serve some evolutionary purpose (Dean Hamer, Lionel Tiger, Michael McGuire, et al.). What all these different theories have in common is that they provide nonreligious interpretations and explanations of religion. That is, they assume that religious understandings of reality are basically wrong. On this premise they try to explain why religion, although being wrong, is nevertheless such a widespread phenomenon. They tend to see the diversity of religions as a further confirmation of their atheistic or naturalistic premise. On the assumption that religion, if it were true, should be far more homogeneous than it actually is, the fact of religious diversity seems to support their view that religion is basically false.