Many Faiths, One Path?

[00:00:05] Speaker A: This is the Return, a podcast about religious reconstruction in a world of deconstruction. I'm Jordan Maddox. [00:00:13] Speaker B: And I'm Dustin Madden. [00:00:25] Speaker A: We're going to start today with some housekeeping. Before we get started with today's episode on world religions. And I just want to remind people that if you are interested in submitting a question or a comment or a story, you can email [email protected] we'd love to hear about your particular perspective, hear your stories, but also hear feedback if there's certain topics you want us to cover. At the end of the day, we're making this for listeners to help them in their spiritual journeys. And I also want to mention that our next episode, if this topic is of interest and you want to submit a question or comment around it, spiritual. [00:01:02] Speaker B: Trauma and how that impacts people's deconstruction and reconstruction journeys. [00:01:57] Speaker A: So the topic of today's podcast is around this concept of many religions and one path. I'll admit that this was a big struggle for me, particularly when I left home, moved to San Francisco to go to college, and literally I joined kind of one of those like Christian college groups. It's called InterVarsity. And we actually shared a, like a club room in the kind of multipurpose building at the university with the Muslim Student association, which was a kind of a funny combo of things going on there. I will say InterVarsity is much more ecumenical and what that means is that you engage with other religions. So they were open to talking. But it was still a strange fit between two world religions that have had quite a lot of conflict over the years. And I think that plus just being in a cosmopolitan place and seeing so many different people of different walks of faith. I ran into a lot of issues in my own personal religious journey around how to conceptualize other religions relationships. And I think there are three issues and I'll just share them and then Dustin, you can give me your perspective. I'm curious. So the first kind of issue that came up for me as a deconstruction variable was this idea that people that aren't Christians but are religious of some kind, they go to hell. That was almost, it wasn't maybe said out loud explicitly like that in my upbringing, but it was implied that there was one path. And if you weren't on that path, even if you were a good person, even if you're practicing your religion, there was no hope. And so that kind of lends itself to an evangelism model where you Go out and try to save people. And so it's just really built into the religion of my childhood. And. And I probably had issues with it that I couldn't conceptualize as a child. But as I grew up and developed, I started asking questions like, how is that fair? What about the people that existed before Christianity? I mean, if you read Dante's Inferno, Plato is actually in hell. He's on the outskirts, but he is in hell. So that just didn't seem fair. It didn't seem good. It didn't seem right. And so for me, honestly, that was the first kind of, like, major deconstruction thought that I had. [00:04:20] Speaker B: First chink in the armor, if you will. [00:04:21] Speaker A: Yeah. So how have you thought about that over time? [00:04:24] Speaker B: Yeah, I came to faith in a space where there was a lot of interfaith dialogue going on. And so it was never really put forward to me as a matter of. Or an issue of, like, evangelism. A lot of the conversation was around, what can we learn from other faiths, the sincerity of their practice, how can that shape and inform us as followers of Jesus? Was the way in which it was engaged in. And so I think I've just held on to that posture of dialogue and conversation throughout. But your story is not uncommon in terms of. [00:05:16] Speaker A: Especially in the cosmopolitan society and. [00:05:19] Speaker B: Yeah. A globalized world. [00:05:21] Speaker A: The United States is an immigrant community with, like, lots of different faiths everywhere. And we're constantly mixing. We're not. What's the word? Homeo. [00:05:29] Speaker B: Homogenous. [00:05:30] Speaker A: We're not a homogenous society, at least religiously. And I think it comes up naturally in some ways. [00:05:34] Speaker B: Yeah. [00:05:35] Speaker A: So that's the first thing. The second thing is related, but it's more about compare and contrast. Remember, at some point in college, I wrote. End up writing a paper about the history of the AIDS crisis. And there was a point in that paper where I looked at kind of the religious community's response to the AIDS crisis, which was part poor, to say the least. And then that actually led me to, while I was in college, volunteer at an AIDS hospice. So I was there for about 18 months. It's a place called my tree, which is compassion. I believe that's what the word translates to. And so essentially what I do is I just sit with people as they're dying. And it was started by a Buddhist monk, and I got to engage and experience with some really fantastic Buddhist practitioners and learn about how they view the world. And, well, I had some differences in my point of view. What the conclusion I came to ultimately was that these were wonderful people doing wonderful work. And so that is offshoot of this idea that we only we have the Christianity has the one way to be good or to be a part of the kingdom of God. But the more I interacted with these people, I was like, if they're not included, then who should be? That was the conclusion I came to. And so that added another layer to the foundation of doubt in the sense that, like, how do Christians conceptualize. How do they conceptualize people doing fantastic work that come from other traditions and how. [00:07:03] Speaker B: Great question. [00:07:03] Speaker A: How do we think about it? So have you engaged with that particular point as well? [00:07:07] Speaker B: Yeah, I think it's a common confrontation, at least to the imagination of people who've grown up with a background like yours, where. Where the way that the question of other faiths or just of. Of human being itself is that you are bad and wrong. And the quote unquote gospel is what makes you right and good. When that's the. When that's your interpretive framework for engaging with other people, what happens? And you think people of other religions, therefore are bad and wrong. And then you are confronted by the atheist with better morals than you have, or the compassionate Buddhist or messes with your way of viewing other people. It's like, hold on, these are good people. What now? And if the only box you have to fit them in is bad and wrong, the cognitive dissonance of trying to make those things work is you just can't. It's really difficult to do. [00:08:21] Speaker A: And I think that's especially relevant, especially where we are in the Central Valley of California. [00:08:26] Speaker B: Yeah. [00:08:27] Speaker A: Where you have a lot of cultural Christians on Sundays or whatever. And so that kind of hypocrisy of that, I think, lends itself to that, where you're saying, like, these people are meditating every day. They're engaged in their spiritual disciplines. And then I go to a church where people are just there to show up and put on a nice shirt. And so I think that's one. The third thing I will say, and the third kind of chink in the armor is really connected to this idea. And it's often described using this kind of anecdote or parable of the blind men touching the elephant, where you have. If you haven't heard the story, it's a group of blind men, they come upon an elephant and they touch different parts of the elephant and they describe their particular part as if it is the whole and not understand, this is the trunk. This is the trunk, this is the leg, this is the Tail, this is the ears. But they can't see the whole of it because they can only feel. And so it's really about the limits to our knowledge and being able to truly understand anything. And so that kind of idea is contrasted with especially what I grew up with, which was very clear. Right or wrong, black and white, dogmatic. You're either in, you're out. We have all the answers which no one else does. So that will. We're going to have an episode at some point in the future about what we call the sin of certainty. But essentially that's for. At least in relationship to world religions. Why do I feel like I have all the answers but a practicing Hindu in Mumbai doesn't? And this hubris that I think I know everything. There's something that seemed problematic about that. [00:09:59] Speaker B: Yeah. You've got the corner on reality. [00:10:02] Speaker A: Yeah. [00:10:03] Speaker B: That's a bold thing to claim. [00:10:06] Speaker A: And I'm sure that for you people, sometimes people come to church expecting that from you, right? [00:10:11] Speaker B: Oh yeah. At least some sort of ability to. Maybe what I hope is at its best it's a pointing to that rather than a possession of it. And that's the. There's a mate. There's a world of difference between those two claims and postures of humility on the one hand of hey, we do not possess this. We are people who claim to point to it. [00:10:39] Speaker A: Yeah. [00:10:40] Speaker B: Versus we possess it and we need you to know that and are pulling you into it. [00:10:47] Speaker A: And I think all of these things tie back to that point as well. Like thinking you have all the answers. And I think the other thing that came up from in my mind related to that was this idea that we were consigning people to eternal fates. Like as if we had the power to do that. [00:11:05] Speaker B: Yeah. [00:11:06] Speaker A: And there was always something so problematic with that for me because I think that it doesn't seem like that's Christian theology that we get to know who goes where or where that where is or any of those kinds of questions. It seems like stretching beyond the reach of what we're able to understand. [00:11:25] Speaker B: Yeah. And hell is a whole other. [00:11:27] Speaker A: We're not going to do that now. [00:11:28] Speaker B: But you know, in 2010 or something like that, a. A super popular evangelical pastor named Rob Bell wrote a book called Love Wins and did a promotional video for it on YouTube. And it begins with kind of this anecdote of someone at his church put on a post it note like that Gandhi was in hell. And that comes the jumping off point, like really, Gandhi's in hell? And you know that for sure. And you needed to let everybody else know as well. And that's just such a. [00:12:04] Speaker A: Do you think that's like people's. Is that I put all my chips in this place and I want to know that I'm not just making this decision and it's hard to. There's just a sense of I'm making these sacrifices to be this religious person. I want to know that there's a payoff. And if this person's doing something else and they're getting the same payoff, how is that fair? Or something along those lines. [00:12:26] Speaker B: Yeah, I think you're onto something. I wonder if it's like in order for me to be right, you, you have to be completely and fundamentally wrong. And that sort of zero sum game is. It gets a lot of it. It makes for again in scare quotes like successful communities because of that black and white thinking is the human mind or the righteous mind. Right. Jonathan Haidt, that's his whole. Whole thing that we make those types. We feel like we need to make those types of decisions. We think we're coming to rationally, but really ultimately they're emotional decisions. [00:13:25] Speaker A: So we're going to jump now into looking at the different ways that Christians have conceptualized how to relate to other religions. And we've broken them down into three different categories, the first being exclusivism, which is the view that Christianity has exclusive access to truth and knowledge of God, etc. Then you have inclusivism, which is some kind of middle ground here where it recognizes value, maybe even some elements of truth in other religions, but still holds that the. That Christianity is the greatest of all of those. So it's like the ultimate truth. And these have a partial perspective. And then finally we have pluralism, which is simply that all roads lead to Rome. It's just it states itself, which is that every religion has equal access and no religion has monopoly on salvation or truth or anything like that. So we're going to start with exclusivism, which is what we've been talking about in my personal experience with religion. And so the basic point here is that Christianity is the only true religion. And so the first kind of sub component of that is that Christ is the only path to salvation. [00:14:36] Speaker B: Yep. Built entirely on. On that. Like Jesus saying, I am the way, the truth and the life. John 10:10, I think something like that, yeah. [00:14:45] Speaker A: So what does that mean, Dustin, when we say that Christ, if you were engaging with someone that has exclusivist mindset and they say Christ is the only path to salvation. What does that mean? [00:14:55] Speaker B: Like underneath it, from this vantage point, it means that Christ Jesus is the only way, the only access point to God. Truth, reality, and everything else is bad and wrong and. And is a dis. Distortion and deception of reality. And so that leads to the logical next step is that every other religion therefore is wrong, is a lie, is a deception. And so there. So it's like a zero tolerance policy for other truth claims. [00:15:38] Speaker A: And it seems like this is really focused on the afterlife. Like this kind of particular brand of approach to other faiths is like just. It's about heaven and hell. Would you say that's accurate? [00:15:50] Speaker B: Yeah, I think a lot of. A lot of religion can be boiled down to afterlife matters, the department of Afterlife Affairs. [00:16:01] Speaker A: So what do you think these people view of interfaith dialogue? How do you think they would look at that? [00:16:06] Speaker B: Zero tolerance. Right. No need for it, because it wouldn't be a dialogue. It would be a monologue. And so this is what we think of. In terms of historically. Right. The. The Crusades would be the key image of what this position does is it goes into a warlike posture against other religions. And to be clear, this is religion itself. This is not a particular or a unique facet of Christianity. [00:16:38] Speaker A: Yeah. [00:16:38] Speaker B: That there's an exclusivist militaristic bent, or the militaristic bent emerges from exclusivist religion, period, of any flavor. But within Christian. Within the history of the West, Right. You've got people trying to fight religious wars. And whoever wins the religious war, that's the true God. That's what throughout the. The stories of the Old Testament, the conquest narratives are. Operate within that same mindset. Then internally you've got like the Spanish Inquisition and the searching for heresy to wipe out people that way. [00:17:19] Speaker A: So we don't do that anymore. Now we. What we do now is evangelism. Right. [00:17:24] Speaker B: Yeah. And so colonization would be the next layer of that. Then evangelism would be the softer term. I think colonization begins with the assumption that God is not present. Wherever the God people are taking God, there is no divine activity whatever happening. They must bring it in and make it happen. So that's. That's effectively the posture. [00:18:00] Speaker A: Yeah. And I. There's a great book called. I think it's called. Yeah, it's called the Christian Imagination. The Theology and the origins of Race. That really. [00:18:08] Speaker B: Yeah. Willie Jennings. [00:18:08] Speaker A: Yeah. That really looks at the history of this. The relationship between evangelism, colonialism and race. [00:18:15] Speaker B: Specifically through the slave trade. And how that. Do you see, like supported Even that. [00:18:21] Speaker A: You see like biblical translation efforts in global south countries of this variety or some postures. [00:18:30] Speaker B: For sure. I think at its best it's. And those efforts are attempts to let everybody know. Right. To translate the Bible into every known dialect. Dialect in the world so that people can understand in their own language. [00:18:46] Speaker A: And so they can say, oh, we did it, you had your chance. It was in your language. [00:18:50] Speaker B: It was in your language. Yeah. So here's the water horse. You can drink it or not. Yeah. [00:18:55] Speaker A: So where does this kind of philosophy exist in the landscape of kind of the Christian universe? How. Where can we see it most present? [00:19:04] Speaker B: I would say in most, like evangelical mission organizations would operate from this perspective. And like everything else, there's a spectrum, right? [00:19:17] Speaker A: Yeah. There's nuances. [00:19:19] Speaker B: There's nuances. At its worst, I think what most of us are rejecting is the prideful, colonizing, arrogant. Like here, let me tell you how things really are. And, and there's a like mega urgency to it because you're going to hell if I don't tell you this. It can be. At its worst, it can be this really anxious posture of trying to force feed somebody truth which. [00:19:50] Speaker A: And it puts a lot of responsibility on you. That's what I remember as a kid. [00:19:54] Speaker B: Yeah. What was that like to grow? [00:19:55] Speaker A: Just like there's an anxiety for you and like finding ways in any conversation to turn it towards that. [00:20:03] Speaker B: Yeah. [00:20:03] Speaker A: There was a sense of like eternal responsibility if you didn't. There's a sense of as like a six year old. [00:20:11] Speaker B: Right. [00:20:11] Speaker A: I remember praying for pray before dinner as a kid. I remember I would always. It was in early 90s, so I would pray for the kids in Somalia that they would have enough food and become Christians. [00:20:23] Speaker B: Like I was there an order to that? [00:20:27] Speaker A: I don't remember. But the point is that it just is. It narrows your lens and it turns for me people into objects as a two means to ends and like counting up salvations as if they were tokens. [00:20:46] Speaker B: Or notches on the belt. [00:20:47] Speaker A: You're playing Mario, you're collecting your gold coins. Like that's how I felt it was. And I think oftentimes there wasn't a sense of I want to understand you first. [00:20:57] Speaker B: Yeah. It was like I. I already understand you. [00:21:01] Speaker A: And I think if, and I don't want to say this to denigrate people that just were completely racist. And the only thing now, because if you truly do believe this, I think you have to be a jerk in some ways. So if your house is on fire. [00:21:16] Speaker B: Yeah. [00:21:16] Speaker A: Like you're not Going to ask politely for someone to get out of it. You're going to just grab them. [00:21:21] Speaker B: Right? [00:21:22] Speaker A: Right. You're going to pull them out of their house and maybe they want to stay, but you're like, nope, you don't have a choice here. Yeah, that's how it felt. [00:21:28] Speaker B: Yeah. And I think that at least to give credit, like, at least it's logically coherent. Right. Okay. I get why you understand why you're operating that way, but the challenge for me, like, pastorally, is what type of image of God do you have where that's what you're working with. [00:21:47] Speaker A: Yeah. [00:21:48] Speaker B: Because that's problematic. [00:21:50] Speaker A: The next category we'll talk about is pluralism. This is a pretty simple idea. All religions are valid paths. They offer different things, but equally legitimate ways. There might be cultural differences, but ultimately they're all tapping into the same divine essence, if you will. Christianity is just as valuable as Buddhism, Hinduism, occult practices, you name it. All those paths lead to the same place. Any kind of way of trying to assert dominance is around power relationships. And I encountered this one later in life when I started attending an Episcopal church in Southern California where they literally had a rabbi, a Buddhist monk, and some kind of Hindu practitioner on staff at the church. And they paid them. And I could go to. [00:22:39] Speaker B: That's a perfect example. [00:22:40] Speaker A: Yeah. I could go to a workshop after church with a Muslim imam right after I listened to a sermon from the Bible. It was all in one building. I think in Fresno, it's like the. [00:22:51] Speaker B: Tolerance bumper sticker just became human. [00:22:55] Speaker A: And I think probably the closest they could. Fresno might be like the Unitarian Church out there, whatever that is, way out in that part of Fresno. But here's the basic kind of themes in pluralist Christianity. God is everywhere. Humans knowledge is limited. So going back to the kind of elephant analogy and that religious diversity was kind of God's design. [00:23:19] Speaker B: Yes. [00:23:19] Speaker A: Now, what's interesting about this, and I'm curious about your perspective, is where does this exist in Christianity? Like, how would you. Is this kind of, like, fringe? Mainline? Is this, like, where does it exist? [00:23:32] Speaker B: Yeah, I wouldn't say it's fringe. I would say this would be. If evangelicalism represents the exclusivist, then like, the Protestant mainline, progressive kind of flavor of Christianity would represent the pluralist relativist. Like, I would encounter people who were like, I'm a Christian because I grew up in America, but I would probably be Muslim if I grew up in the Middle East. [00:23:59] Speaker A: Yeah. [00:24:00] Speaker B: It's just a. It's a matter of relativity to my cultural and Social location. And I think that's a way of understanding, at least from the historical arc of the emergence of pluralism. Right. As the world becomes more globalized, you're not like traversing thousands of miles by foot to then come into some other kingdom where there's another God. You're like walking out of your apartment building in Manhattan and there's Hasidic Jews and Irish Catholics and the whole melting pot of the world religiously. And how do you make sense of this? Right. [00:24:40] Speaker A: You know, and I think a perfect example of this, just to draw a contrast for people. And this speaks to your Mennonite community. Most of the Mennonites we have in Fresno are from the Mennonite German. The German Mennonite German and Russia. Yep. And those were much more in the inclusivist camp. Exclusivist, Excuse me, but then you have Mennonites from Holland and Amsterdam, and they're very different. And I think the key difference there is cosmopolitanism. Holland was a place of free expression, a place where big cities, commerce, capitalism, lots of exchange and trade. And so you get a different version of essentially the same religious tradition based on different locations. [00:25:20] Speaker B: Totally. [00:25:21] Speaker A: And I think the other thing that I should probably point out is pluralism has really been a big part of religious studies programs at universities. [00:25:29] Speaker B: Absolutely. [00:25:30] Speaker A: So you have someone like John Hick, who's a famous kind of theorist around religious pluralism, and essentially what he points to is that religion just always exists in cultural manifestations and you can't have some pure religion outside of culture. [00:25:45] Speaker B: Yeah. [00:25:45] Speaker A: And each culture looks at the divine and develops their own way of understanding what that is. And it's it challenges, especially for someone that grew up in an exclusivist context. Like, it's really hard to wrap your brain around a world where all paths lead. Because when you grow up in black and white thinking, like, you look at the differences and you say, obviously they contradict. Obviously, if I were to set down the Christian Bible and some of the Vedas from Hinduism, there's going to be some key differences for how they understand the world. And are we just going to ignore those or. So I ran into challenges with this, with that church that I was going to, where I was legitimately confused at points like how this works. [00:26:27] Speaker B: Totally. Yeah. I think that's a lot of people's experience, for sure. [00:26:33] Speaker A: Yeah. And I think people in the exclusivist world might look at a Unitarian church or something like that and go, that actually, in fact, is erasing the differences in diversity that exist in our religious practices and trying to collate them into some kind of like homogenous. Just combining all the religions into one, into the perfect religion. And I never saw it that way necessarily or viewed it as a racing difference. But I see that feedback because you're saying you're telling someone. If I were to tell a practicing Muslim somewhere that was maybe much more traditional, that our religions are basically the same thing, I don't think that would be received well. [00:27:18] Speaker B: It's like saying, well, what do you mean? I don't see color. And like, okay, now you are minimizing the, the cultural ethnic differences that are very real and come with history and all of that. And. But I, I think at its best the pluralist is trying to find common ground. [00:27:38] Speaker A: Yeah. [00:27:38] Speaker B: Where the exclusivist is working from a higher ground. Right. And that's a one is a more open handed posture. But it gets fuzzy in the sense that, or I guess the source of authority really shifts where in the exclusivist the source of authority is the tradition or the text. And within the pluralist view, the source of authority is really within the person. The individual becomes the most authoritative. [00:28:10] Speaker A: If that's a great point. [00:28:11] Speaker B: Yeah, this works for you, then that's, that's your thing. And so it just shifts where you locate what is authoritative. [00:28:21] Speaker A: All right, the last category, and we're going to call this the middle ground, and this is something that I encountered quite a bit in seminary is this idea called inclusivism. And so the basic point which I'll read is that Christianity is the fullest and most complete revelation, but people in other religions still can be saved through Christ even if they don't explicitly believe in Christ. And so it sees people as gaining valuable things from their religion. That's not Christianity. But ultimately seeing Christ as doing the work for those people too. And so this one's kind of nuanced and interesting. And so it's probably tied to the Rob Bell worldview, which is that Christ is the means of salvation for people that even don't believe. You know, that's that famous phrase like you don't have to believe in God, God believes in you, kind of thing like that might be a way taken. [00:29:21] Speaker B: To its logical conclusion. Right. Yeah. [00:29:23] Speaker A: This is also the branch that really sees like interfaith dialogue as important, like learning from each other, which I think maybe can you suss that out? What would be the difference in interfaith dialogue in a pluralist context versus an exclusivist context? So if you believe all paths are the same, do you even need to talk necessarily, or just, hey, keep doing what you're doing. We're going to keep doing what we're doing. Whereas this, I think, because you do believe you hold some truths that the others don't, you're trying to learn from that. [00:29:55] Speaker B: And I think the primary difference might be something like you in an interfaith dialogue from an inclusivist perspective, you would engage fully as your. I would engage fully as a follower of Jesus while remaining open to hearing and learning from other religious perspectives, traditions, truths. But you're then like reinterpreting back into your social imaginary. Yeah. And yeah, I see it like that. And some, like Rich Mao, who was the president at Fuller while you were there, he's one person, I think, of somebody who represents this posture, like the idea of introducing like, civility into religion, interfaith dialogue, and like having robust disagreements between different traditions, but valuing the conversation. And I think from a, like a Christian perspective, this is like anyone who walks around holding a, like, printed copy of a Bible is already engaged in this dialogue because the majority of the first half of that quote, unquote book is a library from a different religion. [00:31:19] Speaker A: That's a great point. But I think it's interesting to look at evangelism in this because I think there still is Fuller still in evangelical seminary. But I think it. Maybe if I was given that kind of framework as a kid, I wouldn't feel so much anxiety to save all my friends at school. [00:31:34] Speaker B: Yeah. [00:31:35] Speaker A: Because I think. And maybe you can correct me if I'm wrong, but that's a little bit of at least some parts of Mennonite, like, mission work, where it's much more focused on like, building bridges and schools and stuff, and less about counting souls. Would that be an example of what that looks like? It's manifestation? [00:31:52] Speaker B: Yeah, I think at its best, that's what it looks like. It's Going and doing the work of Jesus wherever. And there's this line that gets trotted out all the time from St. Francis of Assisi, where he said, at least it's attributed to him that preach the gospel always and use words only when necessary meaning, just go, do the work. And then when people are like, why are you doing that? Then you explain, because you're going to hell. [00:32:18] Speaker A: Yeah. [00:32:19] Speaker B: I think to go back to the, like the blind person and the elephant analogy. [00:32:24] Speaker A: Yeah. [00:32:25] Speaker B: The. The posture here is. Hold on, wait a second. There's an assumption baked into this story, which is that you are st. You can see, but everybody else is blind. So that's problematic. Like how do I, how can I. Oh haha, that's actually a trunk. It's not. That's the elephant's trunk. That's the elephant's leg. But you can see, but nobody else can. And the posture I would at my best try to live into as a follower of Jesus is the intellectual and relational humility that is most clearly embodied in, in Jesus to engage with other people as Jesus would, with open hands and self sacrificial love. And so that was going to look a bit more like dialogue I think, than in the exclusivist or in the pluralist where we're trying to minimize or hide away the differences. But I think as a, I think in the context of a conversation around reconstruction, I think the pendulum swings for a lot of people from exclusivist to pluralist. Yeah, but I think there is a whole third way here that is both real and humble but isn't necessarily sliding into some of the. Just let's just wipe away all differences and everyone. All roads lead to Rome, but maybe they don't. [00:34:07] Speaker A: Yeah. So where does this particular vision of the world, where does this exist? What forms of Christianity might you see? Kind of an inclusivist approach, like obviously Catholicism post Vatican ii. Yep. There's also a doctrine that was adopted at the end of the 19th century or 20th century that was just basically summarizes what we just talked about, which is that there are people that exist in other religions and they have access to some truth. Even though we understand that Christianity has the kind of the main form of it. [00:34:39] Speaker B: Yeah, I think this is on the whole the like minority position within Christianity. And so it'll show up in Catholicism, it'll show up in Eastern Orthodoxy. It'll show up. [00:34:53] Speaker A: So this is more progressive churches, mainline churches, some progressive versions of some types of churches. [00:34:59] Speaker B: It depends. Right. Like on some of the trends on the whole. But I think there's lots of local communities that are trying to work this out in honest and fresh and refreshing ways. [00:35:25] Speaker A: So we've given you a lot of information. Now we're going to talk about what we should do with it. Not to tell you what to do, but to give you some conceptual perspective and thinking about what you should do with your situation. I think bottom line, full stop, we exist in a cosmopolitan world, secular society, even though I would say we are in the Bible Belt here in the Central Valley in some ways, I think even in Fresno here there's just a wild diversity of religion. And so I think this is not a topic that's going to go away for you, something you're going to always engage with. So whatever particular lens you choose to see other religions through and how to think about what your religion is in context of that, I think you do need to come to some kind of answer for yourself. [00:36:11] Speaker B: Yeah. [00:36:11] Speaker A: I'm sure in listening you could feel some of our energy moving in certain directions. But I think at the end of the day, I think you choosing whichever path you're going to choose, but operating humbly with it, I think is the appropriate. [00:36:25] Speaker B: The key. [00:36:25] Speaker A: Yeah. Because I think the. What we identify with as a problem, both with exclusivism and with pluralism, is this idea that you know everything already. [00:36:37] Speaker B: Yeah. [00:36:37] Speaker A: And I think that is the problem. It's a. It's maybe, to use a fancy word, an epistemological problem. This idea that we know everything or can know everything. Do you see that as the kind of central issue here with. With how we engage with other religions is like certainty. [00:36:52] Speaker B: Yeah. CS Lewis has this great line about, or what he calls like chronological snobbery. [00:36:59] Speaker A: Yeah. [00:37:00] Speaker B: Like, just because you're alive at this point in human history doesn't mean that you're better than everybody. Presentism. [00:37:05] Speaker A: Exactly. Yeah. Yeah. [00:37:06] Speaker B: But I think that connects to what we know now is the most. The best ever in. In human history. So therefore we see things more truly than anybody else ever has. [00:37:20] Speaker A: And I think this actually runs pretty parallel to the politics episode. I think you should just choose a church that fits your framework around this. Because I think if you as like an initial step, I think if you tend to be someone, if you have crystals in your house and you maybe go to a lot of yoga classes. Not to stereotype, but I don't think you'll work very well in an exclusivist context. You know, if you're a more traditional person and the idea that what you're doing is no different from someone else, you're going to be very uncomfortable in a pluralist environment. I know I was actually initially uncomfortable when I first started going to that Episcopal church I mentioned at the top, because there was something in me that was like, there's something wrong here. Like, why? And I remember going to one of those workshops and having almost out of body experience because I had grown up in a certain environment that saw everything as zero sum. And so to see what I saw as logically inconsistent things going on was just so hard for me to process. And I don't want to paint with a broad brush with exclusivist environments. There are some that are very humble and don't assume that they know all the answers. And so I think there is a wide array, but I think you should pursue the environment. If we're talking about reconstruction that fits with where you're at as an initial step. And then, like we've said in the past, you could maybe move into environment that's a little bit more heterogeneous, if that's something you're comfortable with. But I think just like politics, there's an array of options, and I think you should choose the option that makes most sense for your particular makeup as a human. [00:39:00] Speaker B: Yeah. And I think I would want to add to that just simply that especially people who are coming from a similar background to yours, Jordan, I would. If coming to a similar background from yours, I think the assumption is like, okay, I was told that there's only one, but now I have been into the real world and see that there are many and the temptation is to go, therefore, none. And I think what I would want to offer is no, there. You can still engage, even amidst a plurality of different religious perspectives, with something that resonates with you. And you can even take steps towards a more inclusivist type approach as a different way that there are different ways. Even within Christianity, there's different approaches to this. And I think that that matters a lot. And coming from the background that I came from, there. There is actually. I don't know what I'm gonna say. [00:40:09] Speaker A: Yeah, yeah. Let me close with this. I think what we have talked about, and hopefully you gathered from this conversation, is the last thing that anyone should do is start consigning people to an eternal punishment or paradise. I think that. I think that's the biggest problem here. And I think this is why so many people like myself deconstruct, you know, because they. When they're told in a religious environment, oh, yeah, all those other people, your friends at school, they're going to hell unless you do something about it. And all these people that exist in other countries that may never once read a Bible verse or listen to a Christian sermon. Yeah, they're done for, too. Like, there's an element there that, like, that's about the most toxic thing that Christians can do. And. And I think it is, unfortunately rampant and ubiquitous. And I think if there's one thing that should stop, it should be that. [00:41:06] Speaker B: Yeah. And I, rather than assigning people to hell, be like Jordan and go to where people are actually already in hell, like dying alone in the N center and sit with them. That's a much better approach.