Do All Roads Lead to God?

All roads lead to God. That is a common assumption in 21st century America. We have learned the virtues of tolerance and acceptance so thoroughly that we cannot conceive of a God who operates outside the strictures of political correctness. The result is a theology that emphasizes sincerity rather than dogma. The content of a person’s belief, our reasoning suggests, is not nearly as important as the sheer force of her faith’s existence. The doctrines of a religion are relativistic expressions of a greater truth: good people will be rewarded by “god,” whatever that may be.

This sounds like an extremely egalitarian sentiment, but in reality, it is the height of arrogance. The simple truth is that many religions make mutually exclusive claims. If there is one God and Mohammed is his prophet, then Christian claims for the divinity of Christ logically must be false. If it is true, as Christians proclaim, that those who go to heaven will live forever, then the Buddhist concept of Nirvana—to be snuffed out like a candle, freed forever from the pain of being—cannot also be true. This means that when we say all religions lead to God, we are saying is that all religions are equally false. We are actually claiming that no religion is true except our concept of a relativistic God who accepts everyone regardless of belief or practice. The inescapable end of this train of thought for any honest thinker is that all religions are equally useless.

Though it may cost us our allegiance to tolerance and acceptance, we are much better off embracing the differences in religions and recognizing that they all cannot be true. The postmodern “god” is an absurd creation, and to embrace this orthodoxy of inoffensiveness, we must perform some serious mental acrobatics to convince ourselves that these differences among religions do not matter. How much more courageous, how much more human, to seriously examine the world’s religions, our beliefs, and then to take a stand.