https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=iyC4zHC7dxU
Something that I would like you to explore is how does Christianity view other religions. Because when I’m thinking about Christianity and trying to embody Christianity, I’m not at the level where I can accept it and act it fully without processing it. It seems to me that there’s things that are incredibly valid, but there’s things to me that don’t make as much sense. I can’t truthfully act them out when I don’t see that they make sense. There’s a tiny gap in the system that I can’t incorporate. Something that has helped me a lot to try to have more trust in things that don’t make sense is when I notice the same pattern across very different cultures. That’s what a lot of people try to do with perennialism, for example. I think that helped me a lot and I think that helps a lot of people. At the same time, I don’t want to get into the Huxley mode of crunching everything together. They’re all a single theology and whatever. I also don’t want to have the modern liberal tendency of equalizing everything so that I don’t have a hierarchy. There’s these two tensions and I’m trying to balance the two. I’m curious about how Christianity deals with this. What is Buddhism to Christianity? What is Hinduism and so forth? It depends. Christianity doesn’t have one answer to that. It just depends on who you read and also what purpose the person writing is writing for. Who are they talking to and what are they saying? Let’s say it this way. The desire to know what Christians think of other religions, for example, or the desire to make that okay because it’s a pressure right now. It’s a pressure, a social pressure that you say that every other religion is okay. It’s an intellectual pressure. It’s almost like if you don’t do that, then you’re a pariah, like you’re a zealot or whatever. Okay. Now, that’s something. That is an actual social manifestation of something. It’s a social manifestation of a breakdown of identities and a breakdown of particular paths because the thing is that when you walk on a path, the person who comes to you and ask you if the other paths would lead to the same place, what is that person doing? What are you doing? I’m walking on a path and then you come to me and you ask, well, what about this other path on the other side of the hill? Don’t you think that that path would also reach to the top of the mountain? Why do you feel like you have to walk on this path? Aren’t all paths the same? It’s like that person is your enemy. That person is not going to go anywhere seriously because they’re not on a path. You need to be on a path and you can’t make it up as you go along. There’s a danger in asking that question in the sense that if that question you asked me is done in a kind of political desire to be okay with the liberal order, let’s say, to be okay with society. At least I’ll be accepted by my friends if I at least say that I think that other religions are okay. I can be a Christian, but not I think all religions are okay. That way I won’t run into trouble. I’ll be okay with my friends. That’s not the best way to go. This is the way that I see it. I believe that everything that exists is in its proper place and in its proper light. It is a manifestation of the divine logos and it has to be or else it wouldn’t exist. There’s nothing which exists which is evil in itself. Everything that exists has to be a manifestation of the great pattern. There’s no way around it. In that light, I think that I can look at other traditions and I can learn some things from them, but I always do it from the inside of where I am. I am a Christian and I hear a passage from Rumi and I think, hey, that’s not bad, but I’m the Christian. I’m not standing in the nowhere zone of weird universalism. Universalists think they stand above all the paths and they can look at each one and say what they think of each of these paths and they can go, well, I like this about Buddhism and I like this about Christianity and I like this about Hinduism and they make themselves the gods in the world, but in the end, they’re not going anywhere. That’s something that I’ve discovered lately that there’s really good appeal and it’s enticing to kind of pick and choose and to have a very broad overview. I think there’s some true value in that, but there’s also some flaws and some that you pointed out and also something that became more aware as I gained more experience is that these things are so complicated that it’s hard to even grasp one to make coherence. It’s a lifetime of trying to understand these things in fully. If you’re trying to understand all of them and you’re trying to put that into a coherence new path, you’re not even walking anywhere because it’s not only because they have to cohere together, but also because your own understanding also comes from the very act of walking. If you’re too worried about which one to walk, you’re never progressing. It’s more than that. One of the things that happens in Christianity or if you follow, let’s say you engage in Christianity, you take the sacraments, you find a confessor, you do all that. You’re right in there and you’re living the life. There are things that are going to be asked of you and things that you’re going to encounter that you’re not going to like, that you’re just not going to like and you’re not going to understand and will actually maybe frustrate you a little bit. But you know what? That’s actually pretty good for you because what happens if you stand above all religions and then you create your hodgepodge of all the different religions, you end up just taking whatever it is that you like in those religions and then what happens is that nothing will make you grow. How can you grow if there’s nothing to challenge you to something that you’re not? You see it. You can see it. There’s a church in California where they made, there’s a universalist church where they put up all these saints painted up in the apps, like a frieze of saints kind of dancing together. And in that frieze of saints, they put everybody. It’s like there’s Gandhi and there’s like Ella Fitzgerald and there’s some saints. And there’s like, you know, Augustine is there and origin is there. But it’s funny that and so they’re like, we’re universalists. We like everything and everything’s good. And it’s just funny because it’s funny that all the people up in your saints frieze are still all the people you agree with. Right. So why, if you’re a universalist and you think that everybody’s going to be saved, then why is Hitler not up in your frieze? Why don’t you put a little of some people that’ll challenge, maybe not Hitler, but like put someone you don’t like, at least like someone you don’t like, who’s not as bad, but you need to you need. So that’s the problem with this kind of standing above. And you can see it like New Age religion is all that. Like New Age religion, all that. It’s just like porridge. It’s horrible. But it’s funny because the example you gave is actually a perfect parallel to my philosophy journey because I started learning on my own. But then I started to have like an intimation, like, okay, we’re living in the age of internet. You can learn a lot of stuff on your own, et cetera. But I just had the intimation that’s just picking and choosing what I wanted wasn’t the best choice. And I decided to go to university and study philosophy more from exactly because of that. Like I don’t want to have my own biased selection of what I like. So that’s also it’s a perfect parallel with the more religious element as well, because you just you have your own biases. Like you’re just going to have your own little selection of and you just ignore everything you disagree with. And that’s not a good way to move forward. Yeah.