Is “every religion a way to arrive at God”? NO.

The foolish fantasy of Francis

So Pope Francis in Singapore just said the following:

Every religion is a way to arrive at God. There are different languages to arrive at God but God is God for all.

But my God is more important than your god, is that true?

There is only 1 God & each of has a language to arrive at God. Sikh, Muslim, Hindu, Christian, they are different paths.

See and hear for yourselves.  Popesplainers, popesplain that!

Although I am no renowned theologian, I could attempt to do a deep dive into why what Francis said is sentimental rubbish and out of line with the Christian faith.  But providentially, right  before I saw Francis spouting his tripe, I read a good reality check and history lesson from Rod Dreher.

North Toward Valhalla

So I will echo him and give a reality check and brief history lesson myself instead of diving into theology.  Now be warned that, unlike him, I may rant a bit.

One cannot dispassionately examine history and today and still rationally conclude that “every religion is a way to arrive at God” and simply “different paths” in that general direction.  In history and today there are any number of religions that are profoundly evil and paths to Hell on earth, not to mention Hell in the hereafter.

Dreher begins by looking at the Vikings and their paganism.  Every since I became knowledgable of the history of England, I’ve detested the Vikings.  Their raid on the peaceful monastery of Lindisfarne was only the beginning of their atrocities in Britain.  We like to romanticize the Vikings today.  But they were not good people, and their evil pagan religions justified and motivated their evil as Dreher notes, albeit with more sympathy than I.

Another example from history is the Aztecs.  Yes, we like to paint the Spanish conquistadors as the bad guys, and much of what they did was inexcusable.  But look at what they discovered when they came to Mexico. The Aztecs made the conquistadors look like saints. From Randall Sullivan’s The Devil’s Best Trick:

The Spaniards’ new residence was directly across from the spectacular pyramidal temple of the Hummingbird Wizard. The temple had been dedicated just thirty-two years earlier by the man regarded as the architect of the Aztec Empire, Tlacaelel. The highlight of the ceremony was the greatest human slaughter in the history of the Mexica—eighty thousand sacrificed, according to a sixteenth-century Aztec historian; the lines of those who would die stretched for miles, he recalled, and the killing went on without interruption for four days and nights. The Aztec nobility were provided with seats in boxes covered with rose blossoms intended to mask the smell of drying blood and rotting flesh. The stench was overwhelming, though, before even a thousand were dead, and by the second day nearly every one of the boxes was empty.

Yet the eighty-nine-year-old Tlacaelel remained the entire time, personally observing each and every sacrifice. It was Tlacaelel who had instituted Aztec worship of Huitzilopchtli, the Spaniards would learn, and who had invented the “Flower Wars”—contrived conflicts with neighboring tribes that were intended only to take prisoners for sacrifice to the Lover of Hearts and Drinker of Blood.

Today’s multiculturalist and universalist idiots try to explain away the atrocities inspired by evil religions through the centuries.  But history and reality does not let them get away with that just as it does not let Francis get away with his vapid statement.  Dreher:

Yet it seems that the ritualized violence of the Vikings, their slave-taking, and all the rest is not contrary to their religious beliefs at all, no more than Aztec slaving and human sacrifice was a violation of theirs, but rather the fulfillment, no matter how much modern people wish to explain that away.

How do those who participate in reconstructed pagan religions of our time reconcile that? How do they take what they (as products of Christianized civilization) recognize as good, while rejecting what they see as bad? Similarly, if … Muslims who read this care to say, I’m curious to know how contemporary followers of Islam condemn berserkers like Hamas and ISIS, given what we know about early Islam as a warrior religion. I’m asking all this NOT in an accusatory sense, but in a sense of genuine inquiry. I’ve always had a feeling that the reason why hardcore Islamic fundamentalists (salafists) will never go away is because they can always and legitimately appeal to actual Islamic history of the early days of the faith, when Islam was conquering the world for the sons of the Prophet, who was also a warrior-king.

So many of us moderns want desperately to edit the past, to sanitize it, to make it acceptable and useful to us. I’ve read Western journalists and anthropologists writing with great sympathy about Haitian voodoo rituals, but have also, as I mentioned yesterday, spoken to Haitian Christians who have witnessed them, and who left Haiti in part because they couldn’t bear living in a society that lived by the worldview of voodoo.

And today is there any society that has allowed mass immigrations of Muslims or of Haitians with their voodoo that did not soon have reasons to regret it?  Haitian Christians have fled it. Converts from Islam often have to go in hiding from it. Any number of Western women and children have been horrifically victimized by it. Why the heck are we still importing it?

Granted, not all non-Christian religions are so depraved.  I would not mind having Buddhists or Hindus or Sikhs as neighbors.  But lots of Muslims?  No.  And, no, that is not bigotry, that is reality.  That is the “lived experience” of a great multitude to turn a phrase.  Look at what has happened to places were there are high percentages of Muslims in history and today.

So to believe the Popish fantasy, the lie, that all religions and all resulting cultures are good and enriching and therefore are to be welcomed . . . . Well, just take a good look what is happening now to the West, and, unless you are willfully blind, you can see the results of that lie.

The entire West needs some history lessons and reality checks, and fast.  Instead, Pope Francis is giving us fantasies of fools.