Article – Concept of One God
Key Points:
Key Points:
Religion is often associated with the concept of God, but there are many different conceptions of God. Children are naturally curious about different religions and can easily incorporate the concepts of different religions into their lives. As adults, we should also be open to learning about different religions and respecting the beliefs of others. All religions are essentially searching for the same ultimate truth, even if they use different names and metaphors to describe it. We should embrace diversity and pluralism in religion, and see different religions as different expressions of the same human yearning for meaning.
“Some would deny any legitimate use of the word God because it has been misused so much. Certainly it is the most burdened of all human words. Precisely for that reason it is the most imperishable and unavoidable.”— Martin Buber, Jewish philosopher
“In all theistic religions, whether they are polytheistic or monotheistic, God stands for the highest value, the most desirable good. Hence, the specific meaning of God depends on what is the most desirable good for a person.”— Erich Fromm, social psychologist and philosopher
When we think of religion, the first thing that usually comes to mind is “God” — religion and God are almost used synonymously, even. As the above quote from Martin Buber reminds us, the word “God” is one of the most used and misunderstood words in the English language. We tend to toss this word around, assuming it has a singular meaning, when in reality there are likely as many conceptions of God as there are people on Earth! But that does not mean that people of different faiths are closed off from communicating and sharing with one another. Indeed, perhaps it could and should facilitate quite the opposite effect: understanding, mutual respect, discussion and intellectual curiosity with each of these ideas around God.
In our innocence as children, we can quite easily and naturally incorporate the God concepts of different religions into our lives. Uncorrupted by the pressures of socialization, children are bundles of love that are not deterred from interacting with people of different races and religions; they approach otherness with curiosity and excitement. The world is so new to them and they want to know it all! I remember when my classmate Dan Rudolph from Stanford Business School, and then the COO of Stanford Business School, living in Atherton California, visited me in India with his family of three Christian children.
The two girls, 7 and 9 years old, were fascinated by Hindu mythology. They carried home small figurines of Lakshmi (the goddess of wealth), Saraswati (the goddess of knowledge), and Ganesha (the god of good luck). One day when one of the daughters was going to school, her mom anxiously wished her good luck as she was going to have a test. She reassured her mother with the open-hearted, playful confidence younger children so often display: “Mom, nothing to worry about — I’ve got Ganesha in one pocket and Saraswati in the other pocket so I’m completely taken care of!”
Just think how much better the world would be if, even as adults, we all responded to the gods of foreign religions with such a spirit of wonder and openness, embracing diversity and pluralism rather than rejecting them. I see myself on a mission to find ways to help us all rekindle such a relationship with religions and belief systems that differ from our own, and I am convinced that the key to doing so is to highlight the many common threads woven throughout and across the world’s religions.
I, too, had the good fortune of interacting with people of many different faiths from an early age and throughout my life ever since. I was born in Old Delhi which, to this day, remains one of the most religiously pluralistic places in the world. I learned about the commonalities across religions during my upbringing in India, and in adulthood I have seen these commonalities reinforced with evidence as I have looked more closely at the scriptures of all major religions. Initially this lesson came to me through the teachings of my parents and a particular scriptural passage from the Rig Veda: “Ekam sat vipra bahuda vadanti” (truth is one, but called differently by many).
This is echoed in the Qur’an, which affirms that the same truth is being spoken in “monasteries, churches, synagogues, and mosques in which Allah’s Name is often mentioned” (Qur’an 22:40). Similarly, Guru Nanak, the founder of Sikhism (the fifth largest religion in the world with 25 million followers) taught that, “There is but one God. True is his name, creative his personality, and immortal his form. He is without fear sans enmity, unborn and self-illumined. By the guru’s grace he is obtained.” God, Yahweh, Allah, the One, Brahman, the Tao — absolute reality is spoken of with many names by many voices. Whether we hear concordance or discord in these many names has important consequences for the future of our species, as all too often we have seen conflict and violence erupt over the misguided conviction that the God of one religion is “true,” while those of all other religions are “false.”
As a species, we have always wondered who or what created us, who or what created the Earth and the Heavens, who or what is the cause of the laws of nature, natural disasters, and so on. A leading theory in the field of neuroscience known as “predictive coding” argues — I think convincingly — that our brains function as prediction machines.