Stephen
Prothero, the New York Times bestselling author of Religious
Literacy, makes a fresh and provocative argument that, contrary to
popular understanding, all religions are not simply different paths to
the same end… and why this matters greatly for us. Readers of Huston
Smith and Karen Armstrong will find much to ponder in God Is Not
One.
At the dawn of the twenty-first century, dizzying scientific
and technological advancements, interconnected globalized economies,
and even the so-called New Atheists have done nothing to change one
thing: our world remains furiously religious. For good and for evil,
religion is the single greatest influence in the world. We accept as
self-evident that competing economic systems (capitalist or communist)
or clashing political parties (Republican or Democratic) propose very
different solutions to our planet's problems. So why do we pretend that
the world's religious traditions are different paths to the same God?
We blur the sharp distinctions between religions at our own peril,
argues religion scholar Stephen Prothero, and it is time to replace
naïve hopes of interreligious unity with deeper knowledge of religious
differences.
In Religious Literacy, Prothero demonstrated how
little Americans know about their own religious traditions and why the
world's religions should be taught in public schools. Now, in God
Is Not One, Prothero provides readers with this much-needed content
about each of the eight great religions. To claim that all religions
are the same is to misunderstand that each attempts to solve a
different human problem. For example:
–Islam: the problem is pride /
the solution is submission
–Christianity: the problem is sin / the solution is salvation
–Confucianism: the problem is chaos / the solution is social order
–Buddhism: the problem is suffering / the solution is awakening
–Judaism: the problem is exile / the solution is to return to God
Prothero reveals each of these traditions on its own terms to
create an indispensable guide for anyone who wants to better understand
the big questions human beings have asked for millennia—and the
disparate paths we are taking to answer them today. A bold polemical
response to a generation of misguided scholarship, God Is Not One
creates a new context for understanding religion in the twenty-first
century and disproves the assumptions most of us make about the way the
world's religions work.
