In the Easter holiday I had the privilege of staying a few days at a Catholic monastery where a friend of the family is studying to become a priest. One of these days a practicing priest came and sat by our table. The conversation was open and loose and he started to tell us about his background and why he became a Catholic leading into priesthood. The night before, our studying friend had briefly explained his personal revelation where he explicitly pointed out that it was not only an emotional experience but also an intellectual one involving a lot of thoughts. Both of these two Christians had a Catholic cultural background but were not truly religious for a long period in their lives until their personal experience of contact with “God”. I had carefully challenge our friend the other night pointing out that the intellectual dimension of his personal revelation involving thoughts means that religious beliefs are based on thoughts in the brain. If he had been a person with ‘down syndrome’, he would most probably not have become a devote believer. Now, I started to ask the priest about their education. They are, somehow trained as experts in religious beliefs and therefore it seemed to me that they might have a keen interest in other religious belief systems. However, their education is based on two years of philosophy and three years of Christian theology. Nothing is learned about Buddhism, Islam, Mormonism, Taoism, Hinduism, Mandaism, Jainism, Sikhism or any polytheistic, animistic or any other religions or thousands of gods at offer. Not to mention child psychology, evolutionary biology, sociology, brain research or any other subjects useful for serving and understanding other people in a communion. The priest rejected the value of knowledge about other faiths as not relevant since he couldn't really understand Buddhism without being a Buddhist himself. Fair enough.

I then asked him, given that we live in a more globalized world where dialogue between religions becomes more important than ever, how they as Catholics (who really demands respect for the possible absolute truthfulness of their specific belief) respond to other believers of other religions who have similar personal religious experiences as they had. My point was that these other personal religious experiences leads to similar strong claims about gained possession of cosmic, moral and human insight. Through such experiences of being touched by something cosmic, combined with the thoughts and emotions this invokes, a faith-based conclusion arises in the brain, for instance the existence of Vishnu as a divine truth. Surely, the interpretation that each person gives of his spiritual experience will always be a direct function of his knowledge of religious ideas, which for most people will be given by their culture and religious upbringing. Nobody, being born in a Catholic country will come to conclude after a strong personal spiritual experience, that their experience confirms the truthfulness of the theology surrounding Wanka Tanka, if they have never heard about this god.

My point was simply to challenge the priest on how deep their announced “respect” of other religions really went. The priest pointed out that freedom of religion is essential to Catholics, but he as a Catholic certainly believed that the only true path to God was through Jesus Christ and the acknowledgment of the Trinity. This declaration of superficial tolerance seems to me simply to be a way for believers to take the focus away from the real challenge. The challenge is this: what is it in the nature of your personal spiritual experience that makes the specific Christian theological interpretation you embrace any more likely to entail the true nature of the universe than the interpretation Hindus, Muslims or Buddhist apply within the religious domain they are situated? Different people in different cultures where different religious beliefs prevails, all have personal religious experiences involving emotions and thought processes which leads them to conclude by faith that the religious beliefs of their culture is specifically true. They do not tend to have a postmodern view on their own faith, where they admit that this is relevant for them only. Not even the angel worshipping princess of Norway admits this. The majority of believers, especially monotheistic ones, tend to claim that they have discovered the real truth about the cosmos and the existence of specific divine realities. The specific mythology and theology associated with Christianity, Islam, Judaism or Hinduism really are mutually exclusive. The kind of experience people have, which is of a spiritual, emotional and intellectual nature, are symmetric across different cultures and geographical areas. The believer, however, performs a symmetry break when he interprets his experience through a specific religious tradition. It should be easy to see that even if the claimed experience is truly felt for each person, the interpretation given cannot be true for all. The specific truthfulness of any religious belief system can therefore not be triumphed before other religions simply by referring to personal revelations as kinds of evidence.

This kind of critique raised- "if you were born a muslim you would have become a muslim" - is very common among nonbelievers criticizing faiths like Christianity. The paradox (the symmetry break), however, is very seldom emphasized enough in my opinion, and must be pointed out differently. A Christian believer will simply say that while other beliefs may be fair attempts to reach God (and only Jesus will judge people in the end anyway), he as a Christian will insist that his point of view is strong because he believes that Christianity is objectively the only supreme true path to God. The first thing to note is of course that this belief about the superiority of Christianity is itself part of the Christian belief. Christianity entails the claim that Christianity is exclusively true. It doesn't take us anywhere. Another religion can claim the same superiority using the same kind of argument. And most religions certainly entails the belief that its theology is in itself supreme. In Islam, for instance, the Koran is thought to be perfect. Why? Because it says so in the Koran! The Catholic priest doesn't seem to see that he also is biting his own tale.

The symmetry among different religions remains and a believer must at least have the decency to admit the symmetry for a moment before he falls back to his faith-based point of view. What he actually demonstrates is an extremely self-centered view of the universe. I mean, he is self-centered, far beyond the dogmas of his religion. Whether he is a Christian, Hindu or Muslim and argue in the way outlined above, he actually insist on the following logic: the nature and probability of the existence of specific gods must be a function of himself, i.e. they depend on his place of birth. This is the logical consequence of his claim. It should be very easy to see that the truthfulness of something objective (a cosmic reality) cannot depend on yourself or the geographical area you are born into.

If all religions are seen in a post-modern view as simply life philosophies, all claims may be valid since they then are reduced to subjective viewpoints. But none of the Judeo-Christian religions, at least, forget to emphasize that their claims about divine realities are absolutely true, and other religions are false. There is no escape from the Christian God. As a last refuge, a Catholic may also claim that by pure luck he was born in a Christian society, which happens to be a society where the true religion dominates. It should be easy to see that this neither is a very good argument.

Listening to the priest I was reminded by something I believed to be true when I was a child of about 4-5 years old. I had the following logic: all children speaks naturally Norwegian, because this is to speak I thought. However, if your are born in China or England you start out speaking Norwegian naturally but then you have to learn the language of the country you are born in… in addition! I was very lucky, I thought, to be born in Norway since in our country we already spoke the naturally true language and didn't have to consider anything else.


Rune Vabø April 2010

If you're running for American president it seems to me that there are different things you want to say. For instance, you want to say something about: I believe in America, the growth of our economy, the future of our children, the American worker, free speech, democracy etc. Or I believe in the collaboration between nations, our fellow allies etc. You may miss something which would have been nice to say, for instance I believe in medical research, but certainly we would think it would be very beneficial if the presidential candidate left out his personal superstition about various aspects of Kosmos. For instance, he would not do any progress in his campaign by saying "I believe in the divinity of Santa Claus reindeer" or "I believe in the existence of the Celtic God Abellio (the god of apple trees) and the son god Anextiomarus". His advisers would strongly recommend him not to inform his voters about these perspectives of the universe. However, at the same time, his advisers wouldn't even blink if the presidential candidate said something like "I believe in the existence of an Almighty God (not just the protector of apple trees) I believe in Jesus, the son of God, his bodily resurrection from the dead, and I believe my sins can be forgiven by him". In fact, it would probably cause problems for the candidate if he did not express his belief in a Almighty Judea Christian God who cloned himself to a human being sometime in the bronze age. When he after a long speech said something like "God bless America" his listeners would at least agree on the last sentence and take it for granted that by God he meant the Judea Christian Abrahamic God. If he said something like "Abellio bless America" people might start running home for their guns. Simply because of a cultural heritage we find most kinds of superstitions completely ludicrous, while one is found to be almost obligatory. This is the world we live in, in 2010.