DOCTRINE AND RELIGIOUS TRADITIONS 63the latter choice would have a mistaken and skewed view of American history,
and one who thought that all religions were the same would hold a mistaken and
skewed view of religious traditions. It matters insofar as it is important to get
your facts about religions straight, and not otherwise.
Suppose, however, one accepts one of the religious traditions. In one way, the
answer is the same whichever of our traditions you accept. One of the traditions
has the words of eternal life; if you embrace the right one and then read all the
others as if they said the same thing, you will be wrong three times about what
the other religions teach but you will have saved your soul (or whatever). If you
accept a wrong one, and then read all the others as saying what that one says,
then you hide from yourself the truth that you need by identifying it with the
falsehood that you believe.
In another way, the answer to “What difference does it make?” will depend on
what tradition one accepts. For in each case the conception of what believing and
living the truth will bring is importantly different, as is the conception of what
one gets when one believes and lives a falsehood.
There is a complicating factor that I mention in conclusion. Perhaps what
most deeply motivates people to maintain that all religions are the same is that
they cannot stand the idea that anyone be sincere and not be saved (or
whatever). Sometimes this involves their thinking that no matter what anyone
thinks, so long as they are sincere, they deserve heaven – even if all they
sincerely believe in is pleasure-seeking or hatred and torture. But sometimes it
involves believing that anyone who sincerely is seeking the truth and wants to
do what is right must somehow make it home, religiously speaking. They think
that since right belief is taken in religious traditions to be basic to being saved (or
whatever), then if everyone who seeks salvation is to make it home, religiously
speaking, all religious traditions must have the same beliefs. In some religious
traditions at least, it is possible to respond with some degree of sympathy to this
suggestion without denying the plain facts of the matter. Reincarnation
traditions tend to talk here of other lives in other times and climes. The classical
monotheisms talk of people being judged by their response to the truth that is
available to them, and even of a “baptism of desire” in which genuine desire for
the truth is taken as tantamount to possession of it. Exactly how this is
developed will differ from tradition to tradition, and sub-tradition to sub-
tradition, and doing this in any detail is not part of our task here. We merely
point out that the connection between correct belief and being saved (or
whatever) is by no means always taken in a wooden graceless way, particularly
not within the classical monotheisms. But that is another story. Our story in this
chapter ends when we have noted that it is false that all religions are the same
regarding doctrine any more than they are the same regarding diagnosis and
cure, or regarding the experiences they take to be essential to salvation or
enlightenment.