To the editor:

As a result of some recent articles in the Daily and the seemingly endless barrage of religious issues that crop up around us, I’ve been thinking a lot lately about religion. What I realized is this: All religions are essentially just about the same.

All religions have much of the same morals of honesty, giving and loving your fellow man.

All of them stress humility and the acceptance that you are insignificant in the face of God but still live a meaningful and important life of choice.

The world’s religions merely have different prophets, different names for God, different books in which the same essential themes come through. To quote Gandhi, “Supposing a Christian came to me and said he was captivated by the reading of Bhagavat and so wanted to declare himself a Hindu, I should say to him: ‘No. What Bhagavat offers, the Bible also offers. You have not made the attempt to find it out. Make the attempt and be a good Christian.'”

God, Allah, truth, Ahimsa, beauty, the Tao, they are all names for the same thing — that indefinable thing that lies beyond logic, yet within everything. Religions began this way because deep down, humans are pretty similar, too, and wherever they are, human beings feel the same emotions of wonderment, love and belief.

However, organized religion has a long and tragic history of doing the exact opposite of what it professes.

Countless times history has seen Christianity start wars, kill innocent people and destroy civilizations in order to “spread the word of God.” In doing so, such religious fundamentalists completely undermine the entire nature of the religion in which they profess to believe.

Fundamentalism of any kind is inherently against religion. Religion stresses the belief that human understanding, while magnificent, is still fundamentally incapable of understanding the incredible complexity and ambiguity of the world and of God.

Yet fundamentalists claim to have the answer wrapped neatly in a set of ironclad, unchangeable rules. Religion is not about rules, it is about a personal relationship with God (or whatever you want to call him) and a belief in principles that help you guide your life. To again invoke Gandhi, “True spirituality consists not in following the beaten path, but in finding your own path.”

The nature of God has only been conveyed to man through the imperfect medium of flesh, and as such, it is impossible that any religion has it entirely right. The only way to find God is to seek him yourself, through your own path. If the writings of others help you on that search, that is wonderful and often necessary, but to claim that the book you read to find inspiration is fundamentally better than any other, or to undermine the path another human being has taken to find God or to blindly follow someone else’s interpretations of God in fact robs you of that which is essential for any spirituality — a personal relationship with God.

Religious fundamentalism is the highest form of hypocrisy. It consists of reading without understanding, following without thinking. It takes from a large volume of spiritual thought and selects certain absolutes from which it develops its beliefs.

The rules they choose have less to do with their importance in the religion and, not surprisingly, more to do with the personal motives and agendas of the fundamentalists.

It is this kind of thinking that has allowed Christians to take the passages in the Bible, which deal with spreading their religion and use it as an excuse to invade countries for personal gain or Islamic fundamentalists to use archaic passages in the Koran to deny basic human rights to females or countless other tribes to slaughter and persecute those with a different belief structure than themselves as an excuse to wage war.

There is nothing wrong with religion, but everything is wrong with religious fundamentalism.

So, with religious topics springing up all around us, I urge you to think about your own relationship with religion, and ask yourself: Am I truthfully finding my own path to God or blindly following rules set forth by leaders interested more in personal gain than in spiritual enlightenment?

Patrick Breheny

Senior

Physics