Reddit reviews God Is Not One: The Eight Rival Religions That Run the World

I'm not an expert on religion. This is the best book I've found about how to view the religious aspects of the world. Just reading a good summary of the book would be good, but I have yet to find a good one online.

I took a class on African Religions, so I can help on the Yoruba side!

For a quick primer, pick up Stephen Prothero's God is Not One. It's an introduction to World Religions type book, but it's a great read and he includes an entire chapter specifically on Yoruba.

For more mythology, pick up Osun across the Waters by Muphy and Sanford It's a great history of the Yoruba pantheon and how they crossed to the Americas. Osun has some fantastic myths attached to her.

For a really fun read that's a little off topic, pick up Karen McCarthy-Brown's Mama Lola: A Vodou Priestess in Brooklyn. It's an anthropologist's conversations with a Vodou priestess, with descriptions of the ritual (Vodou is a daughter religion to Yoruba - they share a lot of the same ideas and gods), and every other chapter is a short story written by the author that explores some of the history and themes of the tradition. Her descriptions of the various orishas/lwas are really fun reading.

Could all religions be talking about the same thing? Perhaps. Anything's possible. I'll give you my personal take on that question in a bit, as interfaith relations was the focus of one of my majors back in my college days and remains a hobby of mine today. If you're really interested in exploring this topic, let me offer you a few books with differing perspectives on the matter first:

• God is Not One: Eight Rival Religions that Run the World and Why Their Differences Matter, written by Stephen Prothero: This book advocates that religious differences really do matter. From my reading of various theologians from across a number of traditions, this acceptance of differences and that we're not all talking about the same thing (often called the "exclusivist" position) is probably the most common position across religious traditions (at least in my experience).
  
• The Myth of Religious Superiority: A Multifaith Exploration, edited by Paul Knitter: This book is a collection of essays by theologians across a number of world religions who argue that we really are all talking about the same thing after all. Hick (one of the essayists in this book) is a pioneer writer on this subject in particular and comes out of the Christian tradition, but I recommend this collection rather than one of his books so you can get a wider variety of perspectives.
  
• Salvations: Truth and Difference in Religion, written by Mark Heim: This book takes a sort of middle ground between the other two, arguing that each religion really is distinct from the others and pursues a different spiritual path but that perhaps multiple paths can still be right, with say Buddhists working towards nirvana and detachment and Muslims drawing towards a heaven with Allah.
  
  There are plenty more books on this topic than just these three. I merely list these three as decent introductions to their particular points of view as you explore this question yourself. As for my own opinion on the matter, I don't think all religions are talking about the same thing, no. To list just a few of my reasons for thinking that:
  
  

1. Claiming we're all really talking about the same thing in the end is just as exclusive a claim as saying that only one religion is right. In either case, you're insisting a similarly large number of people have all fundamentally misunderstood reality.
   
2. Most religions are addressing fundamentally different problems, even if there are overlaps in a few places. In most strands of Buddhism, the central problem with existence is suffering, which according to Buddhism is caused by attachment: this leads Buddhists to practice meditation in order to cultivate detachment so they can escape suffering and help others. In contrast, the central problem in existence according to my Reformed Christian faith is that we humans were all created good and in the image of God Almighty but now are so infected with evil that we can't help but go awry (whether morally, intellectually, emotionally, etc). Therefore, we need an Almighty Creator to step into our story to love us despite our sins, forgive us our trespasses, reveal the truth of the gospel, save us from evil, and teach us how to live as we were originally created to live, so even when we are weak or overcome by guilt, we can have hope that God will remain faithful to us even so and save us once again. Both Buddhism and my own faith have beauty and power to them, but they're both dealing with very different understandings of the problems facing humanity, the solutions to those problems, and how to live life having experienced such a solution.
   
3. While it's nice to say that all religions are talking about the same thing, clearly we don't think every religion qualifies. It's one thing to say, "Christians, Buddhists, Wiccans, Muslims: we're really all just talking about the same in the end." But it's quite another to lump all those people in with cults like Scientology or the Mansons, with white supremacist neo-pagan groups whose religion is mostly an extension of their bigotry, with ancient religions that held the killing of others in war or human sacrifice as essential rituals, etc. If we draw dividing lines in some instances but not among the major religions, by what standard do we so divide various religions as true or false? How can we say some don't count as "in" while others do while still being philosophically consistent? This is a problem not faced by exclusivists who just assert that they are right and all other religions, while at best perhaps helpful to living well, are not ultimately true.
   
4. Just because we disagree about foundational truths of reality doesn't mean we can't respect each other, treat each other well, etc. I firmly believe that Jesus Christ--as revealed in the Bible and attested to by the creeds of my Presbyterian denomination--is Lord God and the only means of salvation. My Muslim friends in college believed quite differently, as did my Buddhist and Wiccan friends in high school, as do all my atheists and agnostic friends to this day. Our disagreements are serious, which means it's important to discuss them civilly and with compassion for each other, because we are talking about the very fabric and truths of existence. But to just hand-wave away all that tension because it's uncomfortable, rather than to dig into those differences, to see how our disagreements highlight the unique power and beliefs of our own traditions, to learn where each of us is weak in our thinking and needs to reevaluate long-held beliefs... that's a gift I wouldn't give away lightly.
   
5. So to deal with this disagreement, I treat the conflict between me and people who hold other religious beliefs as a sort of "gentlemen's bet with higher stakes" (for lack of a better term). We disagree with each other. That disagreement matters and is rather important. Whoever is wrong is likely in some trouble, depending on how everything plays out. We can't know for sure until we die, if ever. So we each claim our beliefs, and we make our wager with our lives. Until we die, it's wise to civilly talk with each other, explore these questions, etc., because the stakes really do matter. But we can do so civilly, because acting otherwise would just cause more harm and make our attempts to understand the truths of reality all the harder. I personally am a Christian in the Reformed tradition, and my evangelism to others (and listening to them evangelize to me in turn) falls under this civil disagreement, gentlemen's bet lens. After all, with the stakes so high, it's important to share what I believe is true as best I can, while at the same time listening to others share what they think is true. Why? Because first, I might be wrong. Second, if I'm right, knowing what others think will help me explain the truth even better. And third, being civil and at peace with each other provides the best setting for discussing these ideas.
   
   That's just a few of my reasons, anyways. I'm sure I have more, but I'm trying to type this quickly as I'm writing this while on a work break.

A lot of people here have claimed that "there are no unbiased books." This is simply not so, unless it's meant in some facile sense--presenting evidence to support a thesis ought not be interpreted as a bias for that thesis (though the thesis, on its own, may be biased).

Mind you, finding an unbiased book on religion is not so easy. Practically all the New Atheist books are right out, so no Harris, Hitchens, or Dawkins. That's not to say that these aren't fantastic writers, but they obviously wouldn't fall into the category you describe elsewhere of "an agnostic that states all of the beliefs of both sides and arguments for it without pushing towards a particular side."

My recommendations would be as follows:

God is Not One by Stephen Prothero -- This is a book on comparative religion in which the author seeks to demonstrate that the major religions of the world are not all "different paths up the same mountain," as is sometimes expressed to infer that all theists worship the same god. He gives a pretty balanced, if brief, account of the major underlying differences between the world's religions. Informative and interesting, but not particularly profound.

The Case for God by Karen Armstrong -- Here Armstrong examines how religions have changed over time. There's a focus on Christianity and she does a good job of demonstrating the immense changes that the religion has undergone since its inception. Arguing that today's systems of beliefs and views of God are starkly different from those our ancestors, Armstrong makes a strong argument for a return to the Gnostic tradition for those seeking to understand the supernatural. Sadly, she does devote a chapter at the very end of her book (needlessly, I think) to criticizing the New Atheist movement.

The Shadow of a Great Rock by Harold Bloom -- This is simply a literary examination of the King James Bible. No position is taken on the merits of the claims made in the Bible or of individuals who believe these claims. It can be very slow at times, as Bloom painstakingly demonstrates the careful literary decisions made by the authors of the KJV and compares it against contemporary examples like the Geneva and Tyndale Bibles. Obviously, this book is only tangentially related to the topic of religion since it focuses so intently on only one book--having said this, I never really understood or appreciated how people could consider the Bible such a beautiful literary masterpiece until I read this book. Bloom conveys his love of the work (in a purely literary sense--he's Jewish) on every page.

HONORABLE MENTION: The New Oxford Annotated Bible -- It's a study Bible with lots and lots of footnotes and maps and cross-references. Very thorough. It makes everything generally clearer and easier to understand. I can't vouch for a lack bias, since I'm not knowledgeable enough on the topic to discern what parts of the footnotes and introductions are questionable bias on the part of the authors and what's just the straight dope. Further, as with any translation of the Bible, bias may be inherent within the very text itself--though this version does a good job of mitigating that by indicating where and how other translations differ.

For Religion and Spirituality, I'd suggest starting with God Is Not One, it's a book that briefly yet thoroughly explains the eight major religions of the world. If any of them intrigue you, there are plenty of books in each religious study that can help you further, and most of them probably have their own subreddits. As for spirituality, it can be a difficult topic due to almost everyone having a varied sense of spirituality. I might recommend This by the Dalai Llama because of how well it covers modern spirituality playing in the modern world.

God Is Not One by Stephen Prothero might be helpful. It's a book that explores the differences, rather than the similarities between some of the major rteligions in the world. You can find it at http://www.amazon.com/God-Is-Not-One-Religions/product-reviews/0061571288/ref=cm_cr_dp_qt_hist_one?ie=UTF8&filterBy=addOneStar&showViewpoints=0. Note that you can ignore most of the one and two star reviews there, as they're pretty clearly mostly by butthurt members of one religion or another who claim that Prothero isn't respectful enough of their particular religion. However, the complaints that it is not the most scholarly of works is probably pretty accurate; given that it's meant as a book for non-scholars to understand the differences, though, that might not be a terrible thing.

This book won't answer every question you might possibly have on the nuances between the "Abrahamic" Faiths, but it is a great introduction:

http://www.amazon.com/God-Is-Not-One-Religions/dp/0061571288/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1369104390&sr=8-1&keywords=Prothero+God+is+not+One

That's great you are open to learning and interested in broadening your world view. That's a great first step. There are a lot of great books about religion and philosophy. You should start where you are most interested but it can be helpful to get a high-level overview with books like:

• http://www.amazon.com/The-Worlds-Religions-Wisdom-Traditions/dp/0062508113
  
• http://www.amazon.com/God-Is-Not-One-Religions/dp/0061571288/ref=pd_sim_b_4
  
  Basically giving you an idea of different religions around the world and how they differ but also how they are similar. Also the internet is a great resource. Start reading about different religious and philosophical beliefs even on Wikipedia as an easy way to get started. Anyhow, best of luck with everything.

Do you think you've managed to do any of what you just outlined - at /r/femradebates more than here i guess, or whever else you might post.

> I mean interrogating the concepts/perspectives we have in terms of their assumptions

It seems like first of all you have to see if the concepts exist and what they are. At any rate I don't see much difference between what you say you are doing and what you say he's doing. It seems to me that in order to get at a common denominator, you will also be looking at differences. Those two things are not in conflict at all.

For example if you wanted to do something similar with religion, to get away from an amorphous sort of "all religions are the same " (at least the one I know about is), then you'd need to find commonality and difference. so something like this would be useful:

http://www.amazon.com/God-Is-Not-One-Religions/dp/0061571288

Once you've done that then you have a better chance to ask if the differences are significant or not, whether the different groups are essentially all the same thing with a few little trivial changes here and there or whether the common denominator as a concept shrinks upon close inspection of the different groups.

But I don't see you doing anything like this.