The argument of the day is that all religions are directed toward the same God.
Recorded early in the Bible Moses was directed by the God who has revealed Himself, that false religion and false gods were to be avoided in no uncertain terms.
Among virtually all other religions with the exception of the worship of early patriarchs listed in the Bible, all religions were polytheistic. They worshipped multiple gods, none of whom could be said to be “the same god.”
In this setting, God called Abraham to Himself and the world’s first monotheism (single god) began to impact ancient history. Then, and today all religions are not appealing to the same god.
History moved along.Israelbecame captive to pagan rulers one-after-another. Assyrian and Babylonian kings conquered them; Persians, Greeks, and then Romans. Greek and Roman religion involved a pantheon of unalike gods. By the first century A.D. it was still clear that all religions did not lead to the same God.
Christianity emerged as exceptional as had the Jew’s religion been in claiming that all other religion was false.
Jesus was tolerant in letting all but the Jewish Rabbis believe and think as they desired.
Jesus was intolerant of Rabbinical Jewish religion and corrected these leaders openly. He called them hypocrites and said much more against them and what they taught. Here again in history, all religions did not, according to Jesus and His followers, direct men to the same God.
Christianity took precedence in the advance of Western civilization; but what of oriental religions?
The religions of today called New Age or natural spirituality, is of the same basics of oriental religion. This is not “revealed religion.”
A person who trusts his sensations and feelings as religious guidance has no clarity as to who God is. Eastern and New Age thought tends to be pantheistic, that is, to see all as god-ish-ness. They see themselves as a part of the whole and, to them, that is god.
When some speak of “transcendental meditation,” they are speaking actually of a whole of which they are a part, but it is actually god – less; a human psychic experience.
The Old and new Testaments alone speak of God transcending historically at a certain time and place––actually at numerous times, but once in the fullness of the Son of God / Son of man.
Divine intervention by the Almighty and only God is exclusively theme of Judaic/Christianity: it is written that salvation can come by no other name than Jesus, the Christ – the Messiah written of among the Hebrew prophets.
Muslim belief differs here from Judaic/Christian. Allah is said to have revealed to Mohammad that the Hebrew/Christian scriptures are true; but Mohammad taught that God had no Son.
Since personal salvation is the Biblical essential to entrance to heaven, and that through merciful forgiveness; and since ones good must outweigh his evil as Muhammad’s way to heaven, an irreconcilable difference exists between the two.
Some Muslims complain that the Apostle Paul “invented” the Christianity that reads, “By grace are you saved through faith” (in Christ’s historic death and resurrection) “and not of works, lest any man should boast” (Ephesians 2:8, 9).
The Muslim religion, according to the Scriptures, omits the essential that brings one to trust the person of Jesus, for “There is no other name on earth whereby we can be saved” (Acts 4:12).
Obviously, then, while we may let people think as they choose, we cannot agree with them that all religions are the same and lead to the same god. Only ignorance of what is and has been taught in world religions could lead us to such a uniformed conclusion.
Being tolerant to someone in what he believes is far different from being required to accept what they believe because they have not critically thought before they decided.
Buddy