Monday 26 October 2015

Trendy religious pluralism

G.K. Chesterton, writing 90 years ago about the add-on gods of Classical paganism or, as it could be, religious equality and diversity today.

"It is regarded as a liberal and enlightened thing to say that the god of the stranger may be as good as our own; and doubtless the pagans thought themselves very liberal and enlightened when they agreed to add to the gods of the city or the hearth some wild and fantastic Dionysus coming down from the mountains or some shaggy and rustic Pan creeping out of the woods. But exactly what is lost by these larger ideas is the largest idea of all. It is the idea of the fatherhood that makes the whole world one. And the converse is also true. Doubtless those more antiquated men of antiquity who clung to their solitary statues and their single sacred names were regarded as superstitious savages benighted and left behind. But these superstitious savages were preserving something that is much more like the cosmic power as conceived by philosophy, or even as conceived by science."
(The Everlasting Man, 1925, Chapter IV, 'God and Comparative Religion'.My emphasis.)

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