ASK MAULANA — Your Questions Answered

ASK MAULANA Your Questions Answered What are the differences between the major religions of the world? Religion means the ideology of truth. The major religions of the world can be divided into two broad categories—the Aryan and the Semitic, with Hinduism, Buddhism and Jainism falling in the former; and Judaism, Christianity and Islam in the latter. As far as their theological aspects are concerned, there is a marked difference between these two kinds of religions. While the Aryan religions are basically philosophy-based, the Semitic religions are Revelation-based. The former represents the culmination of the philosophical pursuit of truth by the great minds of the world. In the quest for reality, meditation and contemplation brought these saintly souls to the conclusions that gave rise to the organized religions of the eastern hemisphere. The creeds of the Semitic religions on the other hand, are based on divine revelation. That is, God chose a series of Semites to be His apostles and then imparted to them His commandments. These messengers were the bearers of divine scriptures and these divine scriptures provided the fundamentals of the Semitic religions, as they exist today. The basic difference with respect to beliefs of the Aryan and Semitic religions can be briefly described in terms of monism and monotheism respectively. Although both traditions—monism and monotheism—have the idea of God in common, there are fundamental differences in their conceptualization of God. In the Aryan tradition, God is an all-pervasive force rather than an independent reality. Monism posits the totality of a single reality, with all the diverse phenomena of the natural world seen as different manifestations of the same reality. According to this concept, therefore, there is no real difference between the creator and the creature. Thus as per the monism concept of an individual, a personalized God does not exist.