The essence of all the religions is one and the same
The essence of all the religions is one and the same since the Universal God gives it. The religions are different from each other because the religious leaders who are the human beings create the material that surrounds the essence. The skeleton is one and the same and there is no difference in the skeletons of the human beings. The difference lies only in the external materials covering the skeletons, which are flesh, skin etc., in these external materials differences arose due to deficiencies. Suppose there are two students.
One is weak in physics and the other is weak in chemistry. Each student mocks the other for the deficiency. Therefore, the deficiency is the root of difference and quarrels in the religions. The reason for the deficiency is the human brain that developed the external body of the spiritual knowledge. Therefore, the spiritual knowledge is the skeleton and the religion is its body. The deficiency in a religion can be removed by taking the merits of the other religions.
Every religion has deficiency and the rectification of that deficiency should be from other religion without any ego and jealousy. Do not think that you are without defects. Do not think that your parents have no defects. Do not think that your teachers and preachers do not have defects. Therefore, observe others and take the merits from anybody without prejudice. The blind thinking that your nation, your state, your district, your town or village, your caste, your family, your parents, etc., is the best or highest should be eradicated from your brain.
Always base your self on your analysis and commonsense that is observed from the examples in the world. Your elders might have polluted the scriptures but this world is the best scripture written by God. This world-scripture is Universal without any color of any religion. You can develop the entire spiritual knowledge by observing this world and the scientific knowledge existing in the various examples or items of the world. Any human being cannot pollute these. You must be scientific and analytical in your belief. The ignorant and clever religious elders always exploit blind belief.
What essence. How can they essentially be the same when one has a triune god ,others not or even have many gods. Some have a future state while others have that and a previous state? To me, this glosses over the important differences.
“The essence of all the religions is one and the same.”
So, if God exists, you’re saying he must be the Essence at which all the various religions aim. You seem to also be implying that philosophy and science have this same ultimate aim: to penetrate the illusory surface of being, to slip outside appearances into the sunlight of absolute truth. The trouble with all this is the exclusive disjunction when we actually enunciate our faith. We recreate politically these two categories of “enlightened” and “unenlightened” when we institutionalize this sort of dualistic ontology of reality and appearance: after all, don’t appearances in themselves constitute a sort of reality? When we materialize this immaterial Reality in the form of a scripture or a church, when we reify it into a structure and a possession, a grasping and seizing of reality, aren’t we playing the atheist who only knows materialism? Aren’t we ignoring the immediate political consequences of religious faith? Aren’t we becoming ignorant fundamentalists, even and especially when we say something like “all religions are the same”? The kind of lie (or naivete) which tells us “Get along, because you’re all human” is the worst kind of ideology and false consciousness, perhaps most because it claims to be beyond ideology. Are we not absolutely separated from any sort of transcendence? Isn’t this what it means to be finite and mortal?
Scott:
The existence of religion can’t precede it’s essence if religion is some sort of natural phenomena. Now of course any particular religious faith and system probably come into existence long after their essence has been clarified and refined; moreover, the shape of religious faith undergoes significant modification over time.
But as you’re not far from Sartre here, it bears to mention that religion isn’t conscious(ness). You’re extremely close, though: religion is unconsciousness; if God exists, we’ve got to say God is unconscious (which is a sort of way of saying: God exists if we desire his existence.) Interestingly, I think this means we can also say: faith is not a conscious act.
Lacan says this somewhere in one of his seminars. I understand it as kind of like saying: “I defy you all. I can prove that you still believe in God.” This is actually a Nietzschean strategem-- demonstrating that atheism often carries along all of the ideological baggage of religion without any of the transcendence. Really, the death of God should not be taken lightly-- if it is, this is not evidence of a true atheism, but of naivete; the idea of the “death of God” is (supposed to) spur us to re-create the world on a more daring and human foundation, and less on a transcendent/political basis.
Saying God is unconscious also means that we’re not really in control of religion–religious transference means is that some sort of social fantasy is in control of us! More ontologically, saying God is unconscious could also be taken as saying that the Universe is not self-aware, and that it’s up to us to make meaning out of this seemingly random assemblage of junk reality presents us with. If this meaning ends up being religion, the idea that God is unconscious implies that we have this religion only because we desired it; in other words, we attain salvation through God only when we feel we need saving.
Scott:
I’m not even remotely a Kant expert so I’m not exactly certain what this would amount to precisely in his terminology, but I think what we’re tryin to find out is whether the “sublime object” of ideological devotion is One and the Same across science, religion, philosophy, politics, and so on-- and I’m saying this ultimate object just doesn’t exist, neither as a unity nor as a dualism. There is no world; there are only worlds, which are always only spoken of in a SINGLE sense. Multiplicity, right? It’s not just “one” or “two” but an endless “one” splitting into “two,” an endless becoming-bifurcated on all levels of reality, folding, unfolding and refolding… but once again, asserting multiplicity also means saying there is no “big Other” of God, Truth, or the generalized social Other who’s supposed to know… There is none of this auto-reunification of a sundered Being which the initial poster referred to. This is, perhaps, simply a political difference, but in that case I’d have to say something even more hostile, so let’s leave it at Kant: if there IS such a sublime object in which we could place an abiding faith in an absolute, transcendent knowledge, then it is ABSOLUTELY beyond our grasp, and though possibly just over the horizon, always escapes to infinity the moment we feel its pull. The event of God is the trace of His own Disappearance…
who the heck is this guy? does he have any actual devotees, or does he just write these aimless longwinded speeches to an internet without ears to hear?
Thezeus:
Sorry, what exactly doesn’t make sense to you? Saying “faith is not a conscious act” would just mean that we’re not in control of religion. What I’m saying is that when we embrace faith blindly, it’s closer to religion having control over us–since we’re not offering any rational defense of our claims, we’re leading ourselves into the uncomfortable position of having to mindlessly attack anyone who isn’t “doing it” too.
Yes, but this object exists as a fantasy, as the “object of desire”–which is never actually “it”, never really what we desire. Desire is never satisfied; it’s not that desire is a lack, but this object we’re talking about IS lacking, it’s the object without a place: properly speaking, it doesn’t exist anymore than the “I” who craves it does-- this doesn’t mean it’s not real (any more or less real than, say, God,) and often even MORE real than whatever one takes reality to be…
I would agree that human beings for the most part do share an underlying religious kind of blueprint or structure, and the manifestation changes depending on the environment they are in. So I guess it can be viewed as residing in the unconsious. This is projected onto the world in many ways, not just in a religion, though that is the most familiar. Some people seriously have a religious type devotion and develop religious type rituals with their politics or science…
It seems we all have something within our unconscious that can fool us into becoming religious. The challenge is to resist it, to be critical of it, to rise above it.
What essence. How can they essentially be the same when one has a triune god ,others not or even have many gods. Some have a future state while others have that and a previous state? To me, this glosses over the important differences. 
They all share mumbo-jumbo. Reason and reality do not support them. Their essence is just that. =D>