Golden Rule Radical

Posted By David on January 10, 2010

If we take the world’s religions at their best, we discover the distilled wisdom of the human race – Huston Smith

Finding fault with religion is easy. All human endevour is fallible; and religion, being humanity’s attempt to understand “life, the universe, and everything”  as Douglas Adams says, is no exception. 

The challenge in Smith’s comment is to understand what the ”best” of religion is. When I first became interested in interfaith dialogue I realized that what spoke to me most clearly were the threads of commonality that existed in all faiths. The differences that arose from particular times, or societies, or locations couldn’t disguise the common themes of justice, and equality, and compassion.

For those who claim that there must be one “right” way to “believe”, one faith above all others, those commonalities are buried under layers of doctrine and dogma; of extremism and cultural context. They feel the differences far outweigh the similarities.

In one way they’re right.

When prospectors go looking for gold, they know full well that they’ll have to sift through tons of mud and stone to find a few small nuggets.

When harvesters thresh grain, they know full well that there will be many times more straw and chaff than kernels of wheat.

If either of them measured the value of their effort by measuring the weight of what they keep against what they throw away, neither would think their reward worth the work.

When we think that the mud or the chaff are more important than the gold or the wheat, we go home poor and hungry.

We cannot measure the value of the underlying principles of faith by the “weight” of the mud and chaff of doctrine that has accumulated on top of them. We have to willing to wash away the mud; to winnow out the chaff.

To distill the wisdom.

Categories: Golden Rule
Tags: compassion, equality, Ethic of Reciprocity, faith, Golden Rule, justice, kernel of truth, wisdom