On reading about Hinduism I found that there is a version of the Triune God. Brahma, Vishnu, Shiva, different forms of the same all-pervading Brahman. I realize that others may have different interpretations of this, but this is the way I see it.
thedoc:
I don't want to be contentious -- I actually quite like you, and have no wish to offend. But I also don't agree, and since this is a site for this sort of discussion, I'm going to risk being a bit strong in response, okay?
If you look at a group of people long distance..say, several miles, you won't be able to tell their height, gender, age, features...or even their number, if they are in a group. Get closer, and you'll see some of these features. Get closer still, and you'll recognize faces. Get right up to them, and you'll see they're all very different in many ways.
Similarly, if you keep all "religions" distant and treat them as a mass, you can convince yourself they're simply a blob-like manifestation of the same thing. You can mistake yin-yang for good and evil, for example, or mistake
karma for justice, or Allah for Yahweh and both for Zeus or the Gnostic Demiurge. You can mistake Buddhist empty-mind meditation for Jewish full-mind Scripture scholarship. You can mistake the Nirvana concept for Heaven. But in every single one of these pairings, you're totally confused if you do. They're not only not the *same* things; when you look at them clearly, they're often quite *contrary* conceptions, in that one tradition will freely declare that the other tradition is doing precisely the wrong thing, or is failing to look at the world at all in an enlightened way.
Look at you and me right now: we have different viewpoints, don't we? We aren't agreeing about this, are we? If you and I, mere philosophers as we are, can experience a stark disagreement, then what odd logic would lead us to think religious traditions were simply incapable of such strong disagreement?
Now an illustration, if I may. I used to teach World Religions. At the beginning of my class, I would give to my students a little quiz. On one side, it asked rudimentary questions to discern their knowledge and exposure to religions (I didn't want to end up teaching what they may already know, so I had to know what they knew, you see.) So it had questions like, "How many times annually do you go to a religious place?" "A religious service?" "Read from a religious scripture?" etc. On the other side I would have a list of other statements -- all strong opinions people have about religions -- things like "Religions cause wars," "Religions all teach peace and love," "Religions all believe in the Golden Rule," and so on, all beside a ten-point scale to indicate how they agreed or disagreed.
And guess what? The students who scored the most strong, bigotted and ill-informed opinions on the seconds side were invariably all the same ones who scored lowest on the experience side. Many of them freely admitted to having nearly zero exposure to any religious-associated experience; and they were invariably the most strongly opinionated of all...especially about the idea that all religions are the same.
The truth is this: the only way to continue believing all "beliefs" (or "religions," if you like) are essentially the same is to keep them as far from you as possible and in fuzzy focus. If you know anything about them in particular, then immediately elements of that illusion begin to drop away. Know a lot, and the illusion is completely gone.
Me, I've studied a whole bunch, read a whole bunch of their texts, met a whole bunch of folks from different groups, sects and denominations, and been in a whole lot of foreign places. I know darn well they're different and so will you if you go and look. But I don't ask you to believe me.
I say, "Go and look."
-- is that we don't HAVE to do that. We can think. We can change.
