{"id":6831,"date":"2014-12-12T21:52:38","date_gmt":"2014-12-13T02:52:38","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/trinities.org\/blog\/?p=6831"},"modified":"2014-12-13T15:16:01","modified_gmt":"2014-12-13T20:16:01","slug":"religious-diversity-pluralism-and-tolerance","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/trinities.org\/blog\/religious-diversity-pluralism-and-tolerance\/","title":{"rendered":"religious diversity, pluralism, and tolerance"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>I&#8217;ve been thinking lately about <strong>theories about religious diversity<\/strong> lately, because I&#8217;m trying to finish up an article on that topic. One family of theories about religious diversity is what philosophers call <strong>religious pluralism<\/strong> &#8211; the idea that many religions are equally good in some way(s).<\/p>\n<p>This idea gets a lot of lip service in <strong>modern Hinduism<\/strong>. A number of modern-era Hindu thinkers, notably Gandhi, have heavily emphasized that the various religious are like so many flowers in a garden &#8211; each beautiful and unique, with seemingly only personal preferences as a basis for one to pick between them, and which are in no sense in competition. They&#8217;re all paths to God, all true, or maybe all &#8220;valid.&#8221; (It&#8217;s actually hard to get beyond the rhetoric to find just what the theoretical claim is.)<\/p>\n<p>At the same time it is not uncommon for a loudly pluralistic Hindu to assume\u00a0that Hinduism is<strong> far greater than<\/strong> its would-be equals &#8211; that it is the best, oldest, most tolerant, purest, or most beneficial religion, and maybe the source of all the others too.<\/p>\n<p>A lot of people assume a close connection between theories of religious diversity and <strong>religious tolerance<\/strong>. It is assumed the pluralistic views will be correlated with tolerance, whereas <strong>exclusivist<\/strong> (one religion is uniquely best) theories will go hand in hand with intolerance.<\/p>\n<p>But I&#8217;m not sure there&#8217;s any close connection. There are no logical entailments between the pairs; it is coherent that a person should be a intolerant pluralist, or a tolerant exclusivist. \u00a0I think it is an empirical matter, to be investigated by social scientists, <strong>whether and how much there&#8217;s a correlation<\/strong> between pluralistic theories of religious diversity and actual tolerance.<\/p>\n<p>Modern Hindus\u00a0can be very tolerant of other religions, or very intolerant. I was reminded of this lately when I ran across this video on Hindu nationalism.<\/p>\n<p><iframe loading=\"lazy\" src=\"\/\/www.youtube.com\/embed\/gBB4d3nDdsk\" width=\"420\" height=\"315\" frameborder=\"0\" allowfullscreen=\"allowfullscreen\"><\/iframe><\/p>\n<p><em><a title=\"Two years jail for insulting the Buddha\" href=\"http:\/\/bigstory.ap.org\/article\/558a66a53a9443369927915f32235c73\/myanmar-bar-manager-accused-insulting-buddhism\" target=\"_blank\">Update: meanwhile, in a traditionally Buddhist country&#8230;<\/a><\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>I&#8217;ve been thinking lately about theories about religious diversity lately, because I&#8217;m trying to finish up an article on that topic. One family of theories about religious diversity is what philosophers call religious pluralism &#8211; the idea that many religions are equally good in some way(s). This idea gets a lot of lip service in&hellip;&nbsp;<a href=\"https:\/\/trinities.org\/blog\/religious-diversity-pluralism-and-tolerance\/\" rel=\"bookmark\">Read More &raquo;<span class=\"screen-reader-text\">religious diversity, pluralism, and tolerance<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":6834,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"neve_meta_sidebar":"","neve_meta_container":"","neve_meta_enable_content_width":"","neve_meta_content_width":0,"neve_meta_title_alignment":"","neve_meta_author_avatar":"","neve_post_elements_order":"","neve_meta_disable_header":"","neve_meta_disable_footer":"","neve_meta_disable_title":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[45,9],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-6831","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-hinduism","category-philosophy"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/trinities.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6831","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/trinities.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/trinities.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/trinities.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/trinities.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=6831"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/trinities.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6831\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":6892,"href":"https:\/\/trinities.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6831\/revisions\/6892"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/trinities.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/6834"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/trinities.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=6831"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/trinities.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=6831"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/trinities.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=6831"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}