All Thoughts Being Equal

So you might remember my earlier post contra to Dr. Stephen Prothero's Religious Literacy: What Every American Needs to Know—And Doesn't. In that post, I raised some objections to Prothero's claim that "religion matters," including that it's a case of special pleading, and that a lot of the time, religion is somewhat incidental to the salient points of history. Well, on 15 November I attended a lecture here at Western by Dr. Prothero, mostly about his newest book, God Is Not One . In that book, he examines the world's eight greatest religions—in mostly-descending order, Islam, Christianity, Hinduism, Buddhism, Yoruba, Confucianism, Judaism, and Taoism—and especially their differences. In his lecture he explained that, far from being "eight roads up the same mountain" as some people claim, there are actually different mountains entirely. They ask and attempt to answer different "Big Questions." For example, Christianity asks "ho...