Come let us pray?

What could be wrong with “the coming together of different religions” for “witness to unity and development”? Actually a lot is wrong with it. The problem is – religions have contradictory claims. Christians are praying to God who is Jesus. Other faiths are praying to a God who is not Jesus. God cannot be Jesus and not be Jesus at the same time. Therefore we all cannot be praying to, serving, or worshipping God. At bare minimum, one of us must be wrong. It could be we are all wrong. But one thing that we can never say is that we are all right. Different faiths can never seriously say let us come together and worship the same God. Beliefs may be all equally valid in the sense that they are consciously held by sincere people, but they cannot be equally true if they are contrary beliefs.

Not participating in such an event (Inter-Faith Service) immediately would have branded the Evangelicals in the minds of some as some kind of religious fanatics, a group so blinded by their narrow-minded convictions that they have no tolerance for other beliefs. Pluralism in the religious arena is evil. The idea that it does not really matter what philosophy or religion you follow, as long as you have got God (or Gods in some cases) in there somewhere and you are following your religion sincerely then everything will be ok.

This “religious tolerant” view never encourages people to assess the truth value of their religious claims. It is saying do not think about those things, do not criticize and do not say others are wrong. If you subscribe to that then you cannot criticize even the assessment of your own spiritual claims. Religious truth claims must be challenged if we are to have any confidence that they are true.

We need to stop misleading people with words like “tolerance” and “open-mindedness”. They mislead because much of what passes for tolerance today is not tolerance at all, but actually intellectual cowardice. Some prefer hiding behind the myth of neutrality (religious pluralism) to intelligent engagement. It hinders us from dealing with the real issues facing society – what should we be encouraging as a society? The pluralistic idea behind an Inter-Faith service is false by its very nature. That is why it should be rejected, not encouraged. We can live, eat, work and play together…the one thing we cannot do though is say “Come...let us pray.”