Are All Religions the Same?

I would like to talk about a modern idea that is bandied about that all religions are the same. In fact, many people maintain this position. I had someone say to me—I didn’t agree with him, I chose to not say anything—that as long as you are a good person, you can be any religion. However, I don’t believe that’s so. I think we have to understand the nature of religious belief and grasp it.

For example, there are commandments in the Jewish religion and Christian religion. The first commandment of the Decalogue is: Thou shalt have no other gods before me. You can only have one God, you can only believe in one God. That’s all. There is none before him or after him. There is one God alone. There is a second commandment stating no idolatry of graven images, wooden or stone or whatever. These are very important concepts. They permeate the Jewish and Christian religious tradition beyond simply being a good person. These commandments are commandments. They say that God is a spirit and you can’t have an image of him, and that there can’t be polytheism or anything like that. The Jewish and Christian religions reject polytheism and reject graven images, as in the second commandment.

Let me give you another example of the essential nature of a commandment. In the Garden of Eden God commanded Adam and Eve not to eat of the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil. He warned them about it. They disobeyed God and disobedience brought death and destruction and sin and disease and all kinds of evil things into the world. God’s commandments are to be taken extremely seriously.

I think it does not follow that all religions are the same. They are not the same. They are radically different, as in the examples I gave you. In the Jewish and Christian religions there are no graven images permitted of God. God is a spirit, period. The first commandment says you can have no other gods before me. Moreover, the disobedience in the Garden of Eden of the commandment not to eat of the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil brought death and destruction and sin and evil into the world forever. Commandments are very important, very essential and something that cannot be ignored and must be obeyed.

I want to talk about Jesus’s perspective on this. Jesus makes an unequivocal command and statement that we can only know God through him. He leaves us no alternative. He says, “I am the way and the truth and the life. No man comes to the Father but by me.” Jesus is the route alone to God and heaven. Either we accept the first and the second commandments, in which God says he alone is the God, and the second commandment, where there are no graven images, and in the Garden of Eden where a violation of God’s command brought sin into the world. Jesus finally takes the position, the unequivocal position, that he is the only way to know God and to come to heaven. He leaves us no alternative and there is no alternative.

The modern point of view that all religions are the same and everybody is the same and that diversity is the main thing, that is nonsense, it is politics, it is plain disgusting politics, with no meaning. I am not interested in politics. I am interested in metaphysical and theological truth, which I have just defined, in the first and second commandments, in the command in the Garden of Eden, and Jesus’s command that he is the way and the truth and the life and the only way to come to heaven. Accept it, or not accept it, that is the faith that we deal with.