Religious diversity and respect

“Although peo­ple in var­i­ous coun­tries on var­i­ous con­ti­nents have a wide vari­ety of natures, the under­ly­ing prin­ci­pal nature is one—only the sec­ondary char­ac­ter­is­tics are of great variety…Therefore, the idea of God of var­i­ous peo­ple, although basi­cally sim­i­lar, will dif­fer in the details…This gives rise to vari­ety in the mode of wor­ship of God. Con­sid­er­ing the mat­ter objec­tively, there is no harm in sec­ondary dif­fer­ences. If there is agree­ment con­cern­ing the essen­tial nature of God and His wor­ship, there should be no obsta­cle in attain­ing the same result.” (p

It is this kind of broad­ness of spirit that allowed me to func­tion in New Age, Sufi, Chris­t­ian, and other faith tra­di­tions with­out hav­ing to change my basic beliefs.

When I was still a rel­a­tively new mem­ber of the United Church of Christ (UCC), I asked our interim pas­tor Ross Knotts, who was an old United Methodist min­is­ter, how I could be a Chris­t­ian when John 14:6 says, “I am the way, and the truth, and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me.” I told him I was a devo­tee of Krishna and that Swamiji used to say, “Christ, Chris­tos, Krishna, what’s the dif­fer­ence?” Ross replied, “If Christ equals love and Krishna equals love, then Christ equals Krishna.” And so, love is the way by any name you call it. Krishna, Jesus, Chai­tanya, all taught love of God accord­ing to time and cir­cum­stance and the abil­ity of the peo­ple to under­stand and accept.

When I joined the church, my pas­tor said I just needed to agree with the spirit of the State­ment of Faith. I didn’t need to agree with each and every spe­cific detail. There was no dogma or creed. We were all free to believe as the spirit lead us.

“The UCC there­fore receives the his­toric creeds and con­fes­sions of our ances­tors as tes­ti­monies, but not tests of the faith…It affirms the respon­si­bil­ity of the Church in each gen­er­a­tion to make this faith its own in real­ity of wor­ship, in hon­esty of thought and expres­sion, and in purity of heart before God…In essen­tials unity, in non-essentials diver­sity, in all things char­ity. The unity that we seek requires nei­ther an uncrit­i­cal accep­tance of any point of view, nor rigid for­mu­la­tion of doc­trine. It does require mutual under­stand­ing and agree­ment as to which aspects of the Chris­t­ian faith and life are essential.”

These kind of beliefs allowed four denom­i­na­tions to come together as one. These kind of beliefs allowed me to func­tion within the church as ordained clergy and still be devoted to Radha Krishna within my heart. I think Thakurji would agree with these prin­ci­ples and his fol­low­ers would ben­e­fit by fol­low­ing an adapted ver­sion of them also. The num­ber of splin­ter groups among his fol­low­ers, even on this island, are many. I feel alien­ated from them all by dif­fer­ences over dis­ci­plic suc­ces­sion and style of devo­tion. It would be nice if we could be more uni­fied in an inde­pen­dent, decen­tral­ized, non-hierarchical way that respects the beliefs of all.

Book­mark It

This entry was posted on Tuesday, January 10th, 2006 at 20:23 and is filed under Steve's Musings. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.