#the way that the Torah does indeed seem to say that it's ok to do as they are doing

[ventbloglite]

The way Israeli Zionists are using the long history of Jewish suffering against those who are now suffering and dying at their hands and against those from outside the warzone who wish to end that suffering and support Palestinian rights to be alive is sick. It's manipulative. Imagine looking at the suffering of your people and going; "I can use this to freely commit genocide on a different kind of people and escape criticism. Anything they do, anything anyone does, except sit and take it, will be deemed anti-semitic which we all know is considered morally the worst thing ever and will make people think of Nazi's, so shutting down negative conversation about us and help for them." And imagine that fucking working.

[troybeecham]

Fr. Troy Beecham

Sermon, Proper 16 A, 2020

Matthew 16:13-20

“When Jesus came into the district of Caesarea Philippi, he asked his disciples, “Who do people say that the Son of Man is?” And they said, “Some say John the Baptist, but others Elijah, and still others Jeremiah or one of the prophets.” He said to them, “But who do you say that I am?” Simon Peter answered, “You are the Messiah, the Son of the living God.” And Jesus answered him, “Blessed are you, Simon son of Jonah! For flesh and blood has not revealed this to you, but my Father in heaven. And I tell you, you are Peter, and on this rock I will build my church, and the gates of Hades will not prevail against it. I will give you the keys of the kingdom of heaven, and whatever you bind on earth will be bound in heaven, and whatever you loose on earth will be loosed in heaven.” Then he sternly ordered the disciples not to tell anyone that he was the Messiah. “

In this morning’s Gospel reading, Jesus continues his ministry in Gentile territory. As we saw in last Sunday’s Gospel reading, Jesus extended his ministry beyond the Jewish people, and beyond Jewish ideas of who was loved by God and was acceptable as a companion (literally, one with whom you share bread). Jesus was willing to face rejection from his own people in order to teach them, and to teach the Gentiles, that the love of God is not constrained by our ethnic, socio-economic, linguistic filters, or any other filter that we might use to decide who God loves. Jesus later summarizes this by saying, “Do not judge others, for the measure that you use will be used against you”, referring to the Day of Judgment, when God, the only true judge, will call each of us before his throne to account for our lives. St. Paul extends the idea later by saying that we should not even judge ourselves, because our systems of judgment are all irreparably flawed, mostly by self-interest.

This does not translate into a loose interpretation of Jesus saying that all beliefs and behaviors are “ok” with God simply because God loves us where we are when we find him. The opposite is true; Jesus always said to a sinner who had either been rescued by him or who became his disciple “Go and sin no more”. Conversion of life is not a requirement of salvation. Not at all. Salvation is the free gift of God to all who place their trust in him. Conversion of life is, however, the sure sign that we have indeed become vessels of the Holy Spirit of God, who produces in us the “fruits of repentance”, which are love, joy, peace, forbearance, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness and self-control.

The teaching of Jesus that God loved all people was difficult for the Jewish religious leaders of the day, and for most Jewish folks, including his disciples, who were only interested in the salvation of the Jewish people. That Jesus regularly required his disciples to travel with him outside of Jewish territory and to become companions of unclean Gentiles was a tremendous strain upon their fidelity to him, even as much as they were in awe of him and the power of God at work in him. But Jesus is unrelenting in his requirement that all who would be his disciples must grow to love as greatly as he loves, and so in this Gospel reading, Jesus takes his disciples to a true ‘den of iniquity’, to the pagan Roman city of Caesarea Philippi.

Caesarea Philippi was a regional Roman trading hub, located along major trade routes that connected sea trade from Caesarea Maritima to the inland cities across the region. One of the distinguishing physical features of the city was a massive grotto and cave system, which every ancient culture considered to be the gateway to the underworld, literally called the Gates of Hades (Hell). In earlier eras, when that region was occupied by the Canaanites and the Syro-Phoenicians, there was a shrine dedicated to Baal, a deity who demanded human sacrifice, especially the ritual murder of infants and children. After the conquest of Alexander the Great, the shrine was rededicated to the Greco-Roman fertility deity Pan (literally, ‘the one who is all’). The religion of Pan was primarily a religion of fertility, a religion that exalted sex, power, and wealth, and that included ritual orgies as worship of the deity. For faithful Jews, the association of the Gates of Hell with pagan, Gentile religion was an easy one.

In much the same way, it is easy for any of us to judge other peoples as being unclean, unworthy of God’s love, and worthy of destruction. Every people, every nation, every political party, every religion thrives, on some level, on the judgment of others ‘not like us’ and ‘dangerous to our way of life’. Human history is replete with examples of human wickedness perpetrated ‘for the good’ because of our human systems judgment. It is for this reason that Jesus is so clear that we must not judge each other because only God can judge. And the Day of Judgment is still on its way.

The entire history of the Jewish people as recorded in the Old Testament is the story of the faithfulness of God and of the Jewish people struggling to live as the covenant people of God, living according to the Torah rather than falling into living according to the beliefs and practices of the Gentile nations around them. The Prophets declared that the conquest of Israel and Judea some 600 years before the time of Jesus was because the Jewish people had repeatedly turned away from God to the worship of pagan deities and living lives that did not give witness to the covenant of God. The fact that Rome had conquered the Jews again brought up for them painful memories and even more painful questions about why had God seemed to abandoned them, again, and what would it take from them for God to save them from their oppressors. The summation of those questions had crystalized into expectations for the coming of the Messiah, the divinely anointed king and military leader who would drive out their enemies, restore their people’s freedom, and leave them unencumbered in their worship of God. As people living under occupation, it had become intensely important that the Jewish people lived visibly different lives from the Gentiles. Faithfulness to the Law and the Prophets had taken on an urgent intensity for the Jewish people.

With such an urgent, intense desire for redemption, the most important question for Jews during the time of Jesus was how to identify the Messiah. Jesus had recently warned his disciples about religious leaders who can foretell the weather but “cannot interpret the signs of the times”, and how they influence others with their flawed systems of judgment, leading them astray. This is the pressure cooker context of Jesus asking his disciples who the people, and who they, said he was. The Greek text shows that when Jesus asks the disciples, "Who do you say that I am?", the verb is in the imperfect, noting a repeated action. Jesus continually asks and continues to this day to ask: “Who do you say that I am?” The answers provided by the disciples are interesting. The people, which seems to mean Jew and Gentile alike, are unclear, but they are certain that at the least he is a prophet, a miracle worker. And so many people today, even many who call themselves Christians, are happy to consider Jesus a prophet, a miracle worker, a great teacher. But Jesus is clear that such simple ‘belief’ is not enough because it falls utterly short of the staggering Truth: Jesus is the Messiah, the Son of God.

The implications for calling Jesus the Messiah are deep, and conflicted. In the Old Testament, kings and prophets, and even the High Priest, were all anointed when they assumed their office. The Hebrew word for ‘anointed’ is Messiah. Each of these offices were in their own small way individual parts of a whole that was expected of the true Messiah who would come at the end of time and usher in the Day of Judgment. So when Simon declares that Jesus is that very Messiah, and the Son of God, he is both giving words to the revelation of God and to the complicated hopes of his people. Such a revelation must surely be shouted from the rooftops! People have often wondered why Jesus then says, “Tell no one that I am the Messiah, the Son of God.” This was the greatest revelation in human history! This was the news that the Jewish people so desperately wanted to hear! Why keep it quiet?!?

Jesus commands them to tell no one because of their complicated ideas and hopes about who the Messiah is and who God is. Right up until the crucifixion of Jesus, the disciples were all excited about Jesus being the Messiah. Their hearts and minds were filled with generations of hope that inevitably required the deaths of their enemies and ended in their investiture with power and authority. How many times did Jesus rebuke his disciples for arguing who would be the greatest in the kingdom of God? For them, and, if we’re honest, for we ourselves, to say that God was on their side meant that God was going to destroy all the people who they hated, for certainly God shares all of our judgments against our enemies! Surely God justifies all of our violence because we are on the side of justice!

The Jewish people of the 1st century, as equally as we today, had very earthly hopes: they all wanted an end to the crushing oppression of the Roman Empire. Each internal group understood this happening in different ways, but ultimately they agreed that it was for the same reason. The long-expected Messiah was destined to overthrow Rome and put them on the top of the smoking pile of rubble, because rubble is always the only thing left when humans make war against each other. As N.T. Wright puts it, no first century Jew would have said: "I want the Messiah to come, die in a humiliating fashion, be resurrected and then promise us that if we follow him, we will die and then enter into a non-earthly eternity with God that will include lots of non-Jews.", and "Everyone knew that a crucified Messiah was a failed Messiah." The Messiah was to bring about the new reign of God on earth, not die as a victim of the intersection of empire and temple.

But that is the Messiah that God had intended all along, as Jesus so patiently tried to teach them. And the disciples were left with crushed hopes and dreams, and their trust in God broken. How often do we experience the same desolation when God fails to act in ways that we expect? And even knowing this, Jesus says to the disciples, “I will give you the keys of the kingdom of heaven, and whatever you bind on earth will be bound in heaven, and whatever you loose on earth will be loosed in heaven.” I want to avoid the dispute about papal authority as much as I can do. The Greek text “I will give you” is in the plural, meaning that Jesus gives to all of the apostles the authority to bind and loose, not Peter alone. So, what may we make of this contentious statement of Jesus?

In rabbinic traditions, the use of the terms “bind” and “loose”, or “oblige” and “permit”, have to do with the authority of the leader of the community to declare what is permissible or not in the believing community. Jesus confers authority to Peter and to all the Apostles to modify the still primarily Jewish Christian community's stance toward the Law, thus opening the way for Gentiles to be considered full members of the Church. At the time when Jesus commands them to “Tell no one”, such inclusion was still not accepted or understood by the disciples. That would only come later, after the Resurrection and the coming of the Holy Spirit. Matthew is here writing in retrospect to support the Apostle’s authority to declare that eating with Gentiles, and by extension other non-observance of the Law, is acceptable where it is in accordance with the teaching, example, and commandments of Jesus to love as greatly as he loved. Even then, the matter was not settled for the Jewish disciples of Jesus, authority of the apostles or not.

This came to the fore in the dispute over Peter's decision to visit to the Gentile Cornelius and to eat non-kosher, unclean food, and then to baptize him and his entire family without requiring first that they become Jewish. The report in Acts 11:2b-3: “the circumcised believers criticized [Peter], saying, ‘Why did you go to uncircumcised men and eat with them?’” Peter's initial response is predicated on his authority, given by Jesus, to determine that the Law was no longer binding on either Jewish or Gentile Christians. The matter was clearly not settled, as we see from the convening of the Council of Jerusalem (Acts 15, c. 45 CE). In the Acts account, Peter continues to speak from the position of his authority conferred by Jesus, even though he was once rebuked by Paul for temporarily giving in to the pressure of those who still believed that the Mosaic Law was binding. Although the ultimate decision of the Council still required abstention from blood, from strangled animals and from food sacrificed to idols, within a few generations all requirements from the Mosaic Law were abandoned.

What are we to make of these things in our own times, my friends? What are the new laws that we have created in our own image to determine who is acceptable and who is deplorable, who has privilege and who’s privilege must be burned down? How are our modern equivalents: critical theory, intersectional theory, Marxist/socialist/fascist philosophy, corporate capitalism, and so many others; how are these any different from the Law that the Early Church struggled to nuance, adapt, or reject? Who has the authority to say which of these are obliged and permitted? Are we any different from the disciples, still so filled with our ideas of justice and humanity, that Jesus tells us to not own him as the Messiah? What parts of our lives have still to be sanctified before our claims to be disciples of Jesus are worthwhile? How much does our proclamation that Jesus is the Son of God still reflect the vanity of human judgment? Who, looking at the Church, looking at me or you, can see anything of the Resurrected Savior who loves us all without judgment? These are weighty and essential questions for us to ask of ourselves. May God enlighten the eyes of our hearts that we might see the Truth and be transformed by him that we might be bearers of that Truth, who is Jesus.

Grant, O merciful God, that your Church, being gathered together in unity by your Holy Spirit, may show forth your power among all peoples, to the glory of your Name; through Jesus Christ our Lord, who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, for ever and ever. Amen.

[urfavmurtad]

Hi ! I just read through your post about what Islam says about other religions, it was very interesting but I have a question. You said (of Muhammed): "He quotes the “prophecy” predicting himself in the Gospels". What is this prophecy? Thank you in advance!

OK… this is actually a lil embarrassing. Despite the fact that Mohammed repeatedly whined that the Jews and Christians were wrong to reject him because he was predicted by past prophets, he only gave one example of such a prediction. And it’s…. uh… not actually from the Bible. This is from the 61st chapter of the Quran:

Jesus, the son of Mary, said, “O children of Israel, indeed I am the messenger of Allah to you confirming what came before me of the Torah and bringing good tidings of a messenger to come after me, whose name is Ahmad.”

So, look. Mohammed didn’t have a damn clue what the Gospels said, as I’ve already pointed out. He heard a bunch of Gospel-based stories, probably from Arab Christians while trading in the north. Some of those stories were based on the Bible, but others were pulled from what might be gently called Biblical fanfic (later apocryphal texts), and he had no way to distinguish one from the other.

This verse is obviously not from the Bible itself and isn’t found in any of the Bibles that pre-date Islam by centuries. Early Islamic authors nonetheless dug through the Gospels searching for it, usually ending up at a verse in the Gospel of John talking about the Holy Spirit, like this:

“when the Comforter comes, whom I shall send you from the Father, even the Spirit of Truth, who proceeds from the Father, he will bear witness to me”

I mean… this isn’t… the verse in the Quran at all, but they were trying!!!

Mohammed’s biography by Ibn Ishaq, which is one of the oldest surviving Islamic works in existence, says that the word for “comforter” in Syriac Aramaic is the same as muhammad (though the Syriac Bible itself just uses the Greek word). So what the Aramaic-speaking Jesus would have literally said, according to him, is that God would send Mohammed at some point in the future. If true, this would be a pretty good argument! Unfortunately the word he is talking about, menahemana, shares neither a sound, a meaning, nor a root with muhammad (h-m-d). Moreover, the Quranic verse doesn’t say “Mohammed”. It says “Ahmed”. Trying to magically turn menahemana into ahmad was too torturous a task for Islamic scholars to pursue, so they tended to drop that line of argument over time.

Some scholars just ignored the whole “Ahmad” part and said that the “Comforter” refers to Mohammed anyway, because why not. But this was unsatisfactory to other scholars, as “Ahmad” does not mean or resemble the word for comforter in Aramaic, Arabic, Greek, or any other language, so why is it there? The core issue of the Quranic verse remained unresolved. Those scholars needed a new explanation for the verse, and here’s where the handy-dandy concept of scriptural corruption of the “original” Bible comes in. Let me explain.

Mo never said or even implied that the scriptures of Jews and Christians had been corrupted from a lost original–he only accused his contemporary Jews of intentionally “hiding” parts of the Torah out of spite towards him and distorting words out of malevolence. He also whined about them incorporating rabbinical concepts into their religion. But the Torah and Gospels themselves, possessed by those same Jews and Christians, are presented as legitimate texts that were divinely inspired throughout the Quran. It plainly states that people in 7th century Arabia could find him described in the Torah and Gospels that they had access to–he calls himself the prophet “whom they find described in the Torah and the Gospels”. Not “the prophet they could have found described in the Bible if it hadn’t been corrupted by Emperor Constantine or whoever”. He never made any distinction made between this supposed “lost original” and the current Bible. To him, they were the same thing–it was just that Jews/Christians willfully ignored parts of it, intentionally misinterpreted it, and substituted its rulings with those pulled from the midrash and such. There was active corruption of the existing legitimate text.

But Islamic scholars eventually realized that many of the Bible’s stories were drastically different from the Quran’s version of those same stories. Moreover, its theological principles are opposed to Islamic principles. These are not issues that can be waived away by saying “oh, they’re just hiding stuff”. So to explain this problem, they came up with a creative idea that unfortunately has zero basis in the Quran or ahadith. This is the principle of scriptural corruption, called tahrif, of the lost originals. Because the Bible conflicts with the Quran, and the Quran must be correct, the Bible must be wrong, even though according to Islamic theology both the Torah and the Gospels (and the Psalms) were divinely revealed. So the Bible must be wrong because someone in the distant pre-Islamic past corrupted it, either intentionally or unintentionally, from the lost initial “correct” revelations of Jesus/Moses/David.

(Those “correct” revelations are assumed to be lost forever. But these same scholars insist that Mohammed is predicted by various verses of the current “corrupt” Bible. How do they know those verses are real when they say so many other verses are fake? This is something that didn’t strike me as strange growing up, but now looking back it’s very much a “HOL UP…” thing.)

Back to the verse in question. Jesus, according to these Islamic scholars, did say that his successor would be named “Ahmad” (the literal meaning of which is “praiseworthy”, like “Mohammed”). It’s just that this verse was changed, which is why it’s not in the Bible. The corruption came in the process of writing the Gospels in Greek.

The Greek word for comforter used in the Bible is paraclete or parakletos, παράκλητος. But that isn’t what Jesus said, and it wasn’t part of the original Gospel manuscripts, according to these very serious individuals. The original word, they say, was periklytos, περικλυτος, which reflected Jesus’ actual words. This second word means “famed” but could be stretched as “praiseworthy”, like ahmad and muhammad.

This word is not found in any pre- or post-Islamic Bibles, at all (not just in this one verse–the word just wasn’t used in the Bible). So the scholars’ argument seems a bit shaky. But fuck it, what dignity did they have left to lose at this point? Jesus said his successor would be some guy named “praiseworthy”, someone wrote it down properly in Greek, but then someone, somehow, for some reason, changed half the letters and made it mean something else and every copy of the Bible that had the original wording has been lost. Mystery solved, hang it up folks!

Anyway, if I may offer another explanation…

“O children of Israel, indeed I am the messenger of Allah to you confirming what came before me of the Torah and bringing good tidings of a messenger to come after me, whose name is Ahmad.”

I’m sure Mohammed really did hear this, or at least thought he heard it, somewhere. There’s a pretty simple reason for that. Mohammed was not a humble man, but he didn’t use his own name here. He said “whose name is Ahmed”, not “whose name is Mohammed”. (If you’re wondering if that poses any theological questions, the answer is no, because he told his followers that he was also Ahmed in addition to Mohammed. That fixes that problem!) If he were just pulling it out of his ass, he would’ve used his actual name, which would fit better with Ibn Ishaq’s whole menahemana theory anyway.

But he didn’t. So where did the verse come from? It’s possible he just misheard some Biblical verse–or multiple Biblical verses accidentally stuck together, as he was prone to doing, since this exact train of thought isn’t found in any single verse. It’s equally possible that he heard this from someone reciting a non-Biblical story, like the stories he pulled the talking-baby-Jesus, Jesus’-clay-birds, etc tales from. Not all of those sources have survived. And so Islamic scholars may have been searching for an explanation for this verse that no longer exists and was never part of the Bible at all.

Oh Mohammed….

[interfaithconnect]

So seeing as this a cool interfaith blog, I think it fun to ask: Are all paths, at their core, the same path but seen through different "lenses?"

Salvē, Anon! I hope it’s ok with other mods if I jump in here, since this was a major issue in my interfaith work and peer ministry in college.

The “all paths up the same mountain” idea sounds comforting but ultimately fails to see the sharp differences in the ontological and teleological stances of various religions. It also fails to grasp that some religions are about orthodoxy (“correct belief” - think of Protestant Christianities) and others about orthopraxy (“correct practice” - e.g., Gardnerian Wicca, Roman polytheism). In short, religions are way too different to arrive at the “all paths, one mountain” conclusion while being intellectually honest. While controversial, Stephen Prothero’s book God is Not One tries to explain the problems with that idea.

This view also implies that there is ultimately “one goal” or “one god,” and that any culture or religion that doesn’t agree with that view is backwards, unenlightened, and therefore does not deserve a place at the interfaith table. Furthermore, this idea has roots in imperialism, raising the voices of certain privileged monotheists over indigenous polytheistic cultures that are less likely to agree.

What interfaith movements seem to be moving away from is the whitewashing of our traditions to be fundamentally all the same, and moving toward honoring our differences while utilizing our similar values to achieve real-world positive change. The Better Together college program exemplified this by putting most of its focus on interfaith volunteering and other social justice projects.

- Mod Evodije

For me personally, I view religion as a way for people to feel connected to the universe, be a part of something bigger, while expressing a part of their individuality. My religious beliefs, while Christian in essence, are rooted in the fact that my religion does not know the ultimate truth; Deity is incomprehensible. To answer your question, I believe every religion walks different paths, with each person holding a piece of divine light. To quote the Gospel of Philip:

“The names of worldly things are utterly deceptive, for they turn the heart from what is real to what is unreal. Whoever hears the word “God” thinks not of what is real but rather what is unreal. So also with the words “Father,” “Son,” “Church,” and all the rest, people do not think of what is real but what is unreal, though the words refer to what is real. Do not be deceived. If words belonged to the eternal realm, they would never be pronounced in this world, nor would they designate worldly things…

Truth brought forth many names in the world for us, and no one can refer to Truth without names. Truth is one and many, for our sakes, to teach us about the One, in love, through the many.”

- Mod Lydia

I think some religions have common roots in similar/the same books or teachings, such as the Abrahamic roots that Judaism, Christianity, and Islam share. I feel that, regardless of your stance on similarity between faiths, all paths should be respected and treated with as much value as the one you follow. My family is interfaith and regardless of the different teachings and lessons that Judaism and Catholicism each emphasize, my father always taught us to be good people, no matter where our faiths/belief systems ended up landing. I don’t think it’s possibly to quantify the multitude of faiths that are out there as “the same”, and I think that everyone looks at the world through their own eyes, so the whole concept of lenses is hard to quantify, too. Everyone practices religion in their own way.

As far as how the Jewish learners of old saw this issue, it all comes back to Torah: the whole premise behind the Torah is that we mere mortals have only a finite amount of understanding - we can’t totally wrap our heads around the concepts that the divine presents to us. The Torah itself is a paragon of diversity - it is something both unifying to all who embrace its teachings and deeply individual to each learner who delves into learning from it.

“The divine reality is singular, whereas we inhabit a reality that is characterized by multiplicity and diversity; Torah, however, embraces both realities.”

- Mod Elana

Great question! With the disclaimer that there’s no single definitive answer, and that none of us will ever know for sure anyway, I personally don’t think so. I believe that every religion is correct in its own way, and that all paths and practices are right for those who practice them. For example, I believe that all gods exist and are separate beings, but I also don’t think people who believe in a single, all-encompassing divine power are wrong. That may seem counterintuitive, or like a cop-out, but the way I explain it is that everyone lives in a slightly different “layer” of reality – Christians in one (and maybe separate layers for particular denominations), Hellenic pagans in one, Buddhists in one, and so one – and every religion is “true” in the layer in which it exists, and for the people who ascribe to it. These “layers” aren’t set in stone, and people can move between them or exist simultaneously in several at the same time, but every person is subject to the rules of the religion in which they believe.

In other words, the power of our belief creates our own reality. I can’t tell you how exactly that works because I don’t know, but I also think it’s not something humans are supposed to, or capable of, knowing. I think that all religions are equally valid and have truth within them even where they seem to contradict one another. Any theory that a living person could come up with is probably not the whole story, nor entirely wrong, just because God/the gods are so much bigger than we are and exist beyond us in a way that’s outside of our understanding. I don’t think there’s any way to say that our personal reality is the same as everyone else’s, let alone the same as our god’s/s’.

I’ve seen far too many wonderful and loving people who believe and worship differently from myself to think that any of us could be wrong, but I also don’t think the richness and fullness of history and culture should (or can) be simplified to “we all believe the same thing anyway”. I mean, perhaps on some level that is the case (and the majority of religions certainly share similar values), but I myself don’t agree that all paths are ultimately the same.

- Mod Kal

I don’t think all paths are same path in that each is a distinct separate entity in itself, with important cultural differences that need to be respected/honored, and not basically the same thing in a different pair of glasses. But I do believe each religious/spiritual practice is a desire to move towards something greater, more awe-invoking than ourselves as tiny existentially inclined people. It depends on what feels right and good to the person themself. So, while other mono/poly/atheistic spiritual traditions may be reaching out to something different than I am, we’re all seeking some sort of Thing(s) to give us a sense of being in this life as well as the next (if the latter is ur thing!).

As the Muslim scholar, Ibn-Arabi wrote, “Beware lest you restrict yourself to a particular tenet [concerning the Reality] and so deny any other tenet, for you would forfeit much good, indeed you would forfeit the true knowledge of what [the reality] is. Therefore be completely and utterly receptive to all doctrinal forms.” [x]

- Mod Neha

The Sikh faith was built on the principle that no one religion holds the Truth. Sikh scriptures freely admit that Divinity — Waheguru — is utterly beyond comprehension, and any attempt to know or describe the Divine will fail. According to Sikhi, the only entity that holds the answers is the Divine, and those answers are not accessible to the human intellect. Even Guru Nanak, the first Sikh Guru, could not claim to know the answers to questions of the Divine. In Japji Sahib, the very first composition of Sri Guru Granth Sahib — the Sikh scriptures — the Sikh Gurus describe Waheguru in terms of mystery and unknowability, humbly admitting to their human limitations. Japji Sahib references Hinduism and Islam to highlight the limitations of human intuition and celebrate the diversity of forms through which humanity has attempted to understand the Divine. Without claiming to know the Truth, Japji Sahib humbly records the following passages:

      By thinking, Waheguru cannot be reduced to thought, even by thinking hundreds ofthousands of times.        …        Some sing that Waheguru seems so very far away        Some sing that Waheguru watches over us, face to face, ever-present        There is no shortage of those who preach and teach        Millions upon millions offer millions of sermons and stories        …        Waheguru is Shiva, Waheguru is Vishnu and Brahma; Waheguru is Parvati and Lakshmi.Even knowing Waheguru, I cannot describe Waheguru; Waheguru cannot be described in words.        …        The state of the faithful cannot be described        One who tries to describe this shall regret the attempt        No paper, no pen, no scribe        can record the state of the faithful.        Such is the Name of the Immaculate Divine.        …What was that time, and what was that moment? What was that day, and what was that date?What was that season, and what was that month, when the Universe was created?The Pandits, the religious scholars [of the Vedas], cannot find that time, even if it is written in the Puranas.That time is not known to the Qazis, who study the Qur’an.The day and the date are not known to the Yogis, nor is the month or the season.Only the Creator who created this creation — only Waheguru Themselves knows.How can we speak of Waheguru? How can we praise Waheguru? How can we describe Waheguru? How can we know Waheguru?O Nanak, everyone speaks of Waheguru, each one wiser than the rest.Great is the Master, Great is Waheguru’s Name. Whatever happens is according to Waheguru’s will.O Nanak, one who claims to know everything shall not be decorated in the world hereafter.

The Sikh answer to your question, anon, is that there is no answer. It would be foolish of me to claim knowledge of the Divine, and any answer I provide will inevitably fail to describe Waheguru’s infinite majesty. I cannot tell you if every faith is the same, nor if they are different, because I do not believe that any faith — not even my own — is entirely True. I believe that nothing short of Waheguru can understand Waheguru’s nature, and to that end, it would be hubris for me to answer one way or the other as if I have an inkling of understanding. To Sikhs, it does not truly matter whether or not all faiths are “the same”, for no one truly knows what Divinity is. To Sikhs, as long as one lives a kind and compassionate life, performs service to others, and pursues justice and betterment for all human beings, it doesn’t matter which religions are true and false and which are the same and different. In the words of Guru Gobind Singh: Manas ki jat sabhe ekai pahicanbo. Recognize the human race as One.

ਵਾਹਿਗੁਰੂ ਜੀ ਕਾ ਖ਼ਾਲਸਾ, ਵਾਹਿਗੁਰੂ ਜੀ ਕੀ ਫ਼ਤਿਹ ।

Waheguru Ji Ka Khalsa, Waheguru Ji Ki Fateh.

- Mod Lily

In Hinduism, that is probably a semi-accurate statement. I say ‘semi’ because there is still a group of us who view it otherwise. As for me, I would think it’s fairly accurate.

In Hinduism, there are many forms of worship. During Thaipusam, millions of devotees pierce needles through their body to carry a kavadi and walk from a temple to temple. While that is one way to show devotion, others carry milk pots on their heads and walk instead. So you see in Hinduism itself there are alternatives to certain things that are done.

Generally all faiths teach us to be good human beings. The difference lies in how to achieve the greater divine and be united with our creator again.

In conclusion, Hinduism believes that all paths lead to God.

“Whatever you do, do it as a dedication to God. This will bring you the tremendous experience of joy and life-freedom forever.” - Bhagavad Gita

- Mod T