Do All Religions Lead To Heaven?
“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 isn’t just a “man on the street” belief. Lawyers, doctors, and scientists hold to this as well. It is murmured in quaint coffee shops around the world and shouted from the couch of your favorite talk show. Oprah has made a career on this brand of pluralism.
Before we throw our lot in with the pluralist crowd, though, we should pause and think. Is it really true that all religions are fundamentally the same?
A moment’s reflection will tell you this notion is hopelessly bankrupt. For starters, some religions don’t have the golden rule. Others don’t stress loving one’s neighbor. In fact, goodness isn’t even on the radar screen with some religions. Past that, even among the religions that have something like the golden rule, it isn’t central. If you analyze the central tenets of the world’s major religions, for example, you will see they are worlds apart.
Christians believe Jesus was crucified on a cross. There is no Christianity without that belief! Muslims, however, reject that; what’s more, to Muslims, holding to the crucifixion of Jesus is no small thing–it’s a big no-no! Jehovah’s Witnesses believe Jesus was the archangel Michael, and Christians reject such a thing. God is a personal creator who is separate from His creation in Christianity, whereas all is one in Hinduism. All these beliefs are main pillars of each faith. Even each faith’s beliefs in the afterlife are worlds apart–heaven, reincarnation, nothing, etc.
If you reflect further, you’ll see that these can’t all be true! God is either personal or impersonal. He either exists or He doesn’t. In no case can God be both personal and impersonal, real and fake. Jesus either is the Messiah or He is not. In no case can He be both the Messiah and not the Messiah. When you die, you either are reincarnated, go to heaven, rot in the ground, or hitch a ride on a comet…but you can’t do it all!
Some might object by saying “what’s true for you might not be true for me.” Jesus rose from the dead “for me,” but not for you. What does that even mean? Again, we are not talking about ice cream. With ice cream, preference reigns; personal tastes are subjective. But the resurrection of Christ is a claim not about preference, but about history, and therefore it is either true or false, not true “for me” or false “for you.” Denying this makes about as much sense as saying, “Lincoln was shot for me, but not for you.”
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 a good response? No. As Ravi Zacharias often notes, even in the streets of Shanghai, they look both ways when crossing the street, because they understand that that it’s either them or the bus, not both. Also, when thinking about spirituality, they choose the both/and way of thinking *instead of* the either/or, not both. No matter how you twist things, you can’t get away from the either/or at the end of the day. There’s a good reason–it is tethered to reality.
The next time you are discussing religion with your buddies and one of them starts waxing eloquent about pluralism, don’t buy the hype. As my favorite author commonly says, aspirin and arsenic might be both small, white, and round pills, but please don’t stop there when choosing which to take for a headache!
