Tolerance and Religion

There was a blogger who recently referred to something that seems common in the Canadian public mind. This idea is that if you believe that your religion is the only true way to heaven, or that non-believers will go to hell then you are intolerant. In fact, such comments can be found in many statements, both public and private, in the Canadian world. The problem is that such comments betray a lack of understanding of what religion is.

What sort of thing would religion have to be in order for those sort of claims to be true? Well, it could not be the sort of thing to make truth claims. If a religion made a claim that "The moon is made out of cheese" as a core claim of the religion, then that religion would be false. If a religion made the claim that going to heaven could only be accomplished by suicide bombing, then such a religion would be immoral. Neither of these claims are intolerant. So if exclusivism is intolerant, then religion can't have these sort of claims.

The other major feature of religion is the social and emotional aspect. People are married in a church, die in a church and attend weekly services. In some religions, meditation is emphasized. In others, moral practice is emphasized instead. In any case, all religions do have a social aspect. If this aspect were the only aspect of religions, then exclusivism is intolerant. Exclusivism would amount to the claim that my social environment is better than yours. Since the religion would not actually contain any truth claims, this statement could not be made on the basis of religious beliefs. Since exclusivist claims are made inside religious beliefs and using religious authority, such claims could not be based on the truth. Therefore, they are intolerant.

So all of this shows that under one conception of what religious beliefs are, exclusivism is intolerant. Yet there is another way to view religious beliefs. John Hick believes that religious beliefs have an experiential encounter with the Absolute at their core. Now experiential encounters are not propositional truths either. If that is all that religion is, then exclusivism is intolerant under this understanding of religious belief as well.

Since these two views on religious belief are compatible, it is also possible to combine them to form a third view of religion. We could call this view of religion the social-emotional-mystical view. In fact, I think that this third view is more plausible than the previous two are separately. Under this conception, exclusivism is certainly immoral. However, this view is not argued for amoung Canadians. Neither is it identified as a view at all. It is presupposed. Once it has been identified, it needs argument. After all, no consistently moral exclusivist believes in any of these three conceptions of religion. So where is the argument?