Letters to the Editor

All religions are not the same

In Leonard Pitts’ column “Seeing what we need to see,” he attempts to deal graciously with several reported “Jesus sightings” on parking meters, banana peels, etc. It would be far too easy to ridicule these people as superstitious and uneducated, and this he nobly avoids. Nevertheless, his attempt at magnanimity is not really all that better; in fact, it is downright insulting to anyone who actually does hold a religious conviction.

The offense? He treats religion as a delusion that people willingly believe in order to get through the day. As he writes, “One sees what one needs to see and there is no shame in that.” Yes there is a great deal of shame in that. If I am seeing things that aren’t actually there, I should be very concerned and may want to seek medical attention.

When Karl Marx said, “Religion is the opiate of the masses,” he meant it as an insult. Pitts tries to make it a compliment. For Pitts, religion fulfills some necessary human need; it is a bodily function that we all have to do, in some form. Any religion will work, so long as you don’t offend anyone. All religions are basically the same, so there’s no reason why we should fight or argue, is there? This argument is far more naive than the pious folk that Pitts patronizes. All religions are not the same, as those who actually practice and study their religion can tell you. I am a professing Christian and I have a friend who is professing Muslim. We don’t pretend that each other’s religions are the same; they are radically and fundamentally different.

Of course, this doesn’t mean that we can’t have civil conversation about them. But when Mr. Pitts claims that all faiths are basically the same, this cheapens the claims of anyone who actually does believe in something.

Yes, human beings are designed to have faith and to have faith in something. But to be real, that faith cannot begin with us or else it is a low-cost opiate (and that’s not a good thing). Anyone who claims to have faith claims to have an experience with something or someone else beyond our tangible perception. If faith only happens in the mind, than we might as well pray to the Boogey man or Elvis Presley.

What Pitts is espousing, religious syncretism, is one of the oldest lies in the world, going back as far as the Roman Empire. If God is dead, then it really doesn’t matter what you believe or if you believe, so long as you don’t upset anyone else. But if there is a God, if faith is more than just a willing self-deception, then we’d better treat religious claims a little more seriously.

Benjamin Cox

Anderson Township


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