“We should celebrate all things spiritual! Afterall, all religions basically teach the same thing: respect and love for one’s neighbor and doing good to human kind.”

This way of thinking is all the rage. The woods are a ‘teemin with lawyers, doctors, teachers, and talk show hosts who fervently hold to this brand of pluralism.

Let’s pause and think about this for a bit. Is it true to say that all religions are basically the same and/or all religions lead to heaven?

If you actually study the main tenets of the world’s major faiths, you’ll find out that they are quite different.

Just start with the different faith’s concept of God. Lining up the different characteristics of God should cure you of pluralism. The concepts aren’t just different, mind you: many of them are contradictory–they can’t both be true. For example, God is either personal (Islam, Judaism, Christianity), or He is impersonal (many forms of Hinduism). Either He is a trinity (Christianity), or not (Islam). The same thing happens when you line up each religion’s core doctrine on other things.

In no way, shape, or form can all these beliefs be true! Take yet another example: beliefs about the afterlife. Some religions claim you go to heaven or hell, while others claim you are annihilated. Still others claim you are reincarnated. These are not personal taste claims; these are claims about reality, and therefore the laws of logic apply to them. When you die, you can either go to heaven, rot in the ground, or be reincarnated, but in no circumstance can you do them all (Or they can all be false. That is a possibility)!

I’ve heard an objection that when it comes to religion, “what’s true for you might not be true for me.” Is this a good way of thinking? It is not like we are talking about food tastes, which are subjective. No, these are all claims about what really happens after you die. They apply to reality. That doesn’t mean they are false; it just means that they can’t all be true.

Another objection is that all this reflects a western way of thinking. In the west, so the argument goes, it is either this OR that, but in the east, many people are comfortable embracing contradiction. A more common way to think in the east when it comes to contradicting beliefs is “both/and.”

Is this correct? No. It might seem on the surface that the “both/and” reigns supreme in the east when it comes to contradictory beliefs, but nothing could be further from the truth. Notice that you can run, but you can’t hide from the either/or: the easterners who tout the “both/and” logic choose that way of thinking *over and against* the so-called western view. The either/or pops up in pesky ways, doesn’t it?

Be skeptical of the grand claims of pluralism. Sure, Gatorade and anti-freeze might both be green liquids, but it’s the differences that matter when choosing which to drink!