Religion & Law

Rick wrote a post yesterday titled The Dalai Lama is Wrong, quoting the argument made by Stephen Prothero in his new book.  I haven't yet read Prothero's book and don't know from where he draws his conclusions about the Dalai Lama, but I don't think they accurately reflect what the Dalai Lama says or believes.  I've both taken oral teaching from the Dalai Lama (during the time I was Buddhist) and have read much of what he has written and he never tries to claim that all religions are the same.  He does suggest there are convergences, which I think is impossible to dispute.  He also believes there are some shared fundamental values in the major world religions, which I think is equally clear.  He does seek to promote inter-religious harmony, which seems to me to be a laudible goal.

However, as the Dalai Lama writes in the preface to his most recent book , Toward a True Kinship of Faiths, "[t]he establishment of genuine inter-religious harmony, based on understanding, is not dependent upon accepting that all religions are fundamentally the same or that they lead to the same place."  The book is an effort to explore convergences between religions "while setting up a model where differences between the religions can be genuinely apprecaited without serving as a source of conflict.