Many Paths
By Kevin Albrecht
June 24, 2004
Traveling down a road, you come to a fork. For whatever reason, you choose a path to take. At some point, you reach your destination and you find contentment. Later on, you find someone else who is with you and he also has found contentment. You ask him, “Oh, you must have followed the same path I did, right?”
He responds, “No. I followed a different path.”
Do you now deny that he reached the same destination just because he failed to reach that destination in the same way you did? The truth is that for every destination, there are many paths that converge.
Exclusivity
Why is it that many people throughout time have felt that others like them are the only ones who can be right? Is it really possible that there is only one religion that is one-hundred percent true and every other of the millions of other religions— past, present, and future— are percent false? If not, the truth must lie somewhere within many of the nearly infinite number of faiths that exist.
It is nearly impossible to define a religion, since nearly every person has a slightly different interpretation of the “official” doctrines of their named religion. Even between two individuals within a single religious congregation, tremendous variations of beliefs exist. So in order for one faith to be totally true, there could only be one person in the entire world in all time that was right.
When I speak to people of different faiths, one of my first questions is to ask how their faith has changed them. Invariably, almost all of them say that they have an inner peace that they lacked before. Many of them say that they have become better people as a result of their faith. Whether the person practices meditation or prayer, every one of them says that when they are practicing their faith, they feel calm and content. These answers are almost always identical, crossing all boundaries of religion. Whether the person is Buddhist, Christian, Muslim, or Sikh, their faith has brought each of them a level of contentment that they had not or could not feel without it.
If they all describe a similar experience, what would lead one to believe that only one of them is right? Could it really be that all but one is lying? If you believe that you can state with complete certainty that everyone else is lying, then they could do the same thing, considering themselves as the only right one. It would be ridiculous to assume that they are all lying, because each of them describes the same sort of experience, yet many of them would deny that they had any connection to the others.
Nearly every religious path teaches that their path is not easy. As Jesus said in Matthew 7:13, “The gate is narrow and road is hard which leads to life, and few find it.” So just finding a path to life is hard. Many of the religious faithful would say that they have found a path, with great difficulty. How much harder must it be then to not only be certain that you have found a path to life, but that all others who are certain they too have found a path to life are wrong? Since none of us has the ability to see into the hearts and minds of others, we must take each of these people at their word.
Identify
Yet, realizing that there are many paths besides your own does not mean you must accept that everyone is equally right. After all, we don’t have to agree on everything in or to agree on some things. Chances are you already practice this philosophy. As I pointed out earlier, tremendous variation in belief can be found even within one congregation of a religion. In all likelihood, there are many things that you disagree about among members of your congregation. Yet you are able to overlook the things you disagree on and instead concentrate your community on those beliefs that all have in common. In the same way it is possible to have ecumenical dialog with followers of different religions by concentrating on those beliefs that both can agree on.
Thich Nhat Hahn, a Buddhist monk, expresses this philosophy as “identify, don’t compare.” He basically asks us to seek out the similarities between each other’s beliefs. While I believe there are benefits to understanding the differences between religions, that doesn’t mean we have to dwell on those differences. For example, both Islam and Christianity believe in the teachings of Jesus. They both refer to him as Christ, the Messiah. They both believe in his birth from the Virgin Mary. Yet when a Muslim and Christian meet, they might spend all their time debating the differences in their viewpoints on Jesus Christ. On the other hand, they could rejoice in their shared beliefs in God, in Jesus, and the myriad of other points of agreement between these two great world faiths.