I didn’t know that the term “Hindu” was used by the colonial powers as a designation that meant basically “Not Muslim.” I find it a bit alarming how little I know about Hinduism and Hindu practices and beliefs. This is especially eye-opening considering that after getting my degree in Biblical Studies from Biola University and a year at Fuller Seminary, I decided to expand my horizons and started a second B.A. program, this time at Cal State Fullerton as an Anthropology major. I took an intro course in Biological Anthropology and another in Cultural Anthropology. I even took a course called Anthropology of Religion, which very much emphasized the “more than one way” message. Alas, the big take away that I got from that course was from a conversation I had with the Department Chair who was teaching the Anthropology of Religion course when I offered an observation at how Religion is a human expression of trying to understand or make sense of existence. This was in the late 1980s when the Religious Right was making a lot of noise and abortion clinics were being bombed and the department chair said something about our role as anthropologies as being recorders or data gatherers, more or less making me feel like no one, especially those in charge, wants to hear from anthropologists when it comes to decisions that are buried in mountains with cultural assumptions. That’s when I switched majors to journalism (not that I went anywhere with that choice… ugh).

So the idea of many paths versus “I am the Way, the Truth and the Life, no one comes to the Father except through me,” (John 14:6), that’s gotta mess with ones sense of certainty. Before my encounter with Anthropology, one of my favorite books on “religion” was Eerdman’s Handbook to The World’s Religions (1982), which I proudly kept in my library, right next to the other two volumes of this trinity, my copy of Eerdman’s Handbook to the History of Christianity (1977) and Eerdman’s Handbook to the Bible (1973). The book may have appealed to me because it was a well produced text book with short articles, lots of illustrations, charts and images and was squarely written for Westerners unknowingly embedded in Christian Culture. It very much seemed to follow the “Ascension of Man” hierarchical mindset when it came to reducing ancient religions and polytheistic religions to animistic superstitions with the highest form of religion being modern Christianity. I began to see the boundaries to this way of thinking when I took a course at Fuller Seminary called Theology of Religious Encounter, which dealt with living in a modern pluralistic culture. Alas, as I began to have doubts about the One Way, it seemed highly illogical to my western mind that the way of Many Paths would prove to be True. 

I think that was also something that my Anthropology professor, Dr. Jacob Pandian, tried to get across to me, that it wasn’t about finding One Truth, but that non-Western Cultures understood that whatever truth that was out there was not monolithic but spread across all of the truths that are out there and all of the stories told about them. I only heard that important decisions, national decisions were being made without realizing that there is more than One Truth, or, worse, that they were using this One Truth mindset for their own political ends. So I switched majors to uncover a different One Truth. Oops. 

I know that most of my atheist friends desire a future when all religion and religious practices are swept away from human existence. I think that would be a mistake, in as much as religious expression and customs tell the story of humanity’s struggle with existence and we’d do well to not sanitize those stories, memories and customs from our world. It would be good if we stopped weaponizing these beliefs and treated it more like family lore and traditions and not something to fight or kill over. Granted, people get all bent out of shape when they discover that one prefers DC over Marvel or StarTrek over StarWars. So that’s going to be a huge challenge, to unravel the value of our cultural stories from unnecessary tribalism or antagonistic nationalism. Would that we learned to share this one world with all of the different ways that people have chosen to live in it. Enjoy. 


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Tags: Crash Course, Crash Course Religions, Hinduism, Religious studies, video Mondays

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