ABSTRACT
As a result of the globalization of the past century we are today much more aware of religious diversity than were earlier generations. This in turn has prompted fresh and urgent questions about the relation between the religions and the implications of religious disagreement for one’s own religious commitments. Religious diversity involves not only differences in rituals or dress but, more signi - cantly, basic differences in ways in which religions understand and respond to reality. The major religions maintain that humankind, and in some cases, the cosmos at large, is in some undesirable state and that there is a way to overcome this predicament. Each religion offers its own remedy for what is af icting humankind, its own vision of the soteriological goal and how this can be attained. ‘A religion proposes a diagnosis of a deep, crippling spiritual disease universal to non-divine sentience and offers a cure. A particular religion is true if its diagnosis is correct and its cure is ef cacious’ (Yandell 2004: 191). Christian, Islamic, Hindu, and Buddhist traditions maintain that accepting certain truths is essential to attaining the soteriological goal. But the religions disagree on the nature of the religious ultimate, the human predicament and the way to overcome this predicament. Judaism, Islam, and Christianity, for example, claim that the universe was created by an everlasting, allpowerful God, although they disagree over the nature of this Creator. Non-theistic traditions of Hinduism, Buddhism, Jainism, and Shintoism deny that there is such a God. Both Islam and Christianity maintain that Jesus is to be esteemed, but they disagree sharply over his identity and nature. Christians accept Jesus as the unique incarnation of God: fully God and fully man. Muslims reject this as blasphemous, insisting that although a great prophet, Jesus was only a man. Christianity teaches that the root problem confronting humankind is sin against a holy and righteous God. Hindu, Buddhist, and Jain traditions typically regard the problem as deeply embedded ignorance about reality, although they disagree among themselves over whether enduring souls actually exist. Given such competing claims, it has generally
been accepted that not all of the central assertions made by the religions can be true; at least some are false.
