Faith

As a child, you were almost certainly instructed in one faith or another. Many of us grew up in a world where one particular set of beliefs predominate to the virtual exclusion of all others. A jew, a christian, a samaritan, a muslim; all of these profess to know the right way to follow their faith. They share a set of scriptures; some textual variations not withstanding. Yet how differently they interpret those texts.

Which version is correct? Your answer will depend on your personal beliefs which again usually depend on your childhood environment. What is more, you will probably have learned that the others are W R O N G. Which is strange because the jew, the christian, the samaritan and the muslim; each will have learned that the others' beliefs are wrong. Which version is correct?

We can have the following:

• One is correct; the others are wrong.
  If it is true that 'One is correct', then it follows that the vast majority of the world are wrong. That will be true regardless of which belief you choose as the correct one. Many, myself included, feel deeply unsettled by this conclusion.
• All are wrong.
  I suppose only a smug atheist would choose this possibility. Even so, negation of belief is itself a belief, so an atheist would, like it or not, fall into the 'One is correct' catagory, after all. Logically, this possibility is difficult to defend.
• All are correct.
  As many beliefs are dogmatic and contradict each other, I think we can rule out this possibility too.
  
• All contain some approximation to the truth.
  This last possibility; that the teachings of all the world's beliefs contain, in greater or lesser degree, some approximation to the truth is the one that seems to have received the least consideration (but see below).

We must turn to an undogmatic belief -- Hinduism -- to see that the idea that other, non-conforming, beliefs need not be W R O N G, just different.

In whatsoever way men approach Me, even so do I bless them,
for whatever paths men take in worship, they come unto Me.
Bhagavad Gita, IV-11

Even the devotees of other gods who worship them full of faith;
even they worship but Me, though irregularly.
Bhagavad Gita, IX-23

And from the more dogmatic Islam, we nonetheless find the following:

Let there be no compulsion in religion: Truth stands out clear from Error: whoever rejects Evil and believes in God has grasped the most trustworthy hand-hold, that never breaks.
Q'ran 2:256

Mankind was one single nation, and Allah sent messengers with glad tidings and warnings; and with them He sent the book in truth, to judge between peoples wherein they differed.
Q'ran 2:213

If the words of Bhagavad Gita differ from, those Q'ran, is it because the message is different, or is the difference the result of the need to express transcendental ideas in the simple language of the intended audience? If the human mind cannot expand to comprehend the sight of the Supreme Being, how can infinite wisdom be phrased in clumsy mortal words? Dante, granted the direct vision of God in the climax of his Divine Comedy, writes:

What I saw is more than tongue can say,
  Our human speech is dark before the vision
  The ravished memory swoons and falls away.
Canto XXXIII, Paradiso

The more we seek the right way, the more we risk rejecting all other paths to the truth as wrong. From rejecting other paths, or beliefs, it is but a short way to denigrating those who follow such paths or beliefs -- heathen, gentile, infidel or whatever. Much blood has been spilt over small differences of belief; perhaps even small differences in expressing the same universal truth.

The Bahá'í Faith was founded on the central principles of the oneness of God, the oneness of religion, and the oneness of humanity. Its implicit message is that the teachings of the world's existing religions are each incomplete or imperfect copies of a deeper, universal truth.

Nameless 

Samaritan

The word samaritan is well known as a synonym for "one who charitably gives help in need" (See Bible, Luke x. 30-37. Perhaps fewer know that it is also the name of a member one of the world's smallest religions. Samaritans regard their Pentateuch -- which differs slightly from the Hebrew Pentateuch -- as the canonical version.