SAM writes:

I wanted to comment on your post “Are All Religions ‘True?'” because it is something I have been thinking about a lot recently. I regularly interact with white liberals of the “spiritual, but not religious” variety and they all tend to think that the major religions are interchangeable and equal.

Not only is this view incoherent, it displays a breathtaking hubris which masquerades as humility. It is incoherent because it violates logic at the most rudimentary level: it maintains that contradictory propositions can be true simultaneously. The liberal refuses to face up to fact that either Jesus is God incarnate or he isn’t; either Muhammad is God’s prophet or he isn’t; either the soul will face divine judgment after death or it won’t; either the extirpation of all desire is highest goal of spiritual enlightenment or it isn’t. The liberal refuses to face this because, once these stark alternatives are seriously acknowledged, one is put into the uncomfortable position of having to make an existential choice where the possibility of error is real and the consequences of error are of the utmost gravity. The liberal position is the supreme manifestation of the “wishful thinking” that secularists constantly impute to religious believers. The liberal proposes that in the spiritual realm we risk nothing and face no choices of any consequence.

Secondly, there is a striking hubris about the liberal position which is buried underneath the pretense of humility. By claiming that all religions are equal, the liberals are in essence saying that they are all false. This is because all of the worlds major religions make exclusive truth claims that are incompatible with the liberal claim that “all paths lead to God.” Thus, unwittingly, the liberal proposes that there is “one true faith” that trumps the particular claims made by historic religions of the world. This one true faith is the relativistic “meta-religion” according to which all religions are “equally valid.”

So the liberal purports to be embracing all religions equally and to avoid making exclusive truth claims. What the liberal actually does is reject the first-order content of every single historic faith while at the same time proposing a pluralistic “meta-religion” as the true faith. And this is exactly how he acts when he discusses religion. The only people he denigrates and treats as “heretics” are those who dare to claim that one religion is true to the exclusion of others. That is, the only “heretics” are those who actually believe the content of their religion.

— Comments —

Jane S. writes:

Doublethink is:

“To know and not to know, to be conscious of complete truthfulness while telling carefully constructed lies, to hold simultaneously two opinions which cancelled out, knowing them to be contradictory and believing in both of them, to use logic against logic, to repudiate morality while laying claim to it, to believe that democracy was impossible and that the Party was the guardian of democracy, to forget, whatever it was necessary to forget, then to draw it back into memory again at the moment when it was needed, and then promptly to forget it again, and above all, to apply the same process to the process itself – that was the ultimate subtlety; consciously to induce unconsciousness, and then, once again, to become unconscious of the act of hypnosis you had just performed. Even to understand the word ‘doublethink’ involved the use of doublethink.”

“The power of holding two contradictory beliefs in one’s mind simultaneously, and accepting both of them… To tell deliberate lies while genuinely believing in them, to forget any fact that has become inconvenient, and then, when it becomes necessary again, to draw it back from oblivion for just as long as it is needed, to deny the existence of objective reality and all the while to take account of the reality which one denies – all this is indispensably necessary. Even in using the word doublethink it is necessary to exercise doublethink. For by using the word one admits that one is tampering with reality; by a fresh act of doublethink one erases this knowledge; and so on indefinitely, with the lie always one leap ahead of the truth.”

1984, George Orwell

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