There was in recent years an op-ed in the New York Times by the Dalai Lama, headlined ‘Many Faiths, One Truth’. He is of course right: there are many faiths, and there is one truth: viz. that all the faiths are bunkum. We all like the Dalai Lama, who in this article iterates the claim that no one heeds, viz. that tolerance is required for a peaceful world – except that he does not extend that warm sentiment to the limit: ‘Radical atheists issue blanket condemnations of those who hold to religious beliefs,’ he laments, alongside mention of murderous inter-religious strife and religion-inspired mayhem – as if ‘blanket condemnations’ and mass murders were somehow on a par. Anyway: the point of mentioning this is to suggest that we never allow passage to the claim that the many faiths are all the same at bottom. Supporters of religion hope that repetition of the claim will make it seem true; in response we should endlessly iterate the obvious, and state it frankly on the tragic evidence of history and our own troubled times: that the various religions are mutually exclusive, mutually blaspheming, mutually hostile, bitterly and deeply divisive, and thus a rash of open sores in the flesh of humanity.
An equally questionable point in the Dalai Lama’s article is that he calls Buddhism a ‘religion’, and indeed in the superstitious demon-ridden polytheistic Tibetan version of it that he leads, that is what it is. But original Buddhism is a philosophy, without gods or supernatural beings – all such explicitly rejected by Siddhartha Gautama in offering a quietist ethical teaching; but he has of course been subjected to the Brian’s Sandal phenomenon in the usual way of time and the masses.