Are All Religions the Same?
Are all religions the same? Many people believe so: that the religions are basically alike, that they are different roads up one mountain and meet at the top. It is a kind thought, and the religions themselves do not hold it. Each one makes claims about God that the others deny: whether there is one God, many, or none; whether God made the world or is the world; whether God became a man. Two roads that lead to different places are not the same road, however pleasant each may be.
The roads do not all go up the same mountain. Buddhism’s road leads to the end of the self and its desires; there is no creator at the top. Islam’s leads to submission before one God who has no son and no equal. Hinduism’s passes through many gods toward one reality behind them all, of which the world itself is a part. Christianity’s leads to a God who made the world, entered it as a man, died, and rose. Those are four summits, not one, and a traveler on any of them would tell you so.
Where the religions do agree, they agree on real things, and the chart below is an attempt to show how much. Each circle is one way of defining God; where two circles overlap, the two definitions share something. The overlaps are small. Most of the chart is circles standing on their own.
If the religions cannot all be right, it does not follow that any one of them is; that is the question the hunt is for. What follows is only this: the differences are real, and a person who wants to know what is true has to read. We have laid out the twelve major theories of God side by side, and the fourteen courses of the Certified Godhunter credential go through each of them in turn.