The labyrinth of existing religions

Philosophers have said and written quite a lot about perfect natural religion.
They have a right to try and fasten down in accurate words the highest duty man has to perform.
But we shouldn't forget reality.
In fact, ideal natural religion is a wonderful idea, but, alas, it's an idea that isn't corresponding to the whole reality. We must realize that actual performance of duty is often holding back and that, because of its numerous possibilities of nuance, we can hardly bring it within the limits of an existing formulation.
Objectively, that is to say measured after the object, we could define religion as "the whole of truths for the intellect, laws for the will, and ritual precepts for the body, through which man, by maintaining them, shows he's subservient to God."
Subjectively, as a conscious service and as an expression of his attitude to life, religion is "man's conviction, in so far as he's answering the right God's asserting to him as the first Cause and final End, by the confession of faith of his intellect, the dedication of his will and the behaviour of his body".

We can't call a religion ideal unless it fully answers the norms of objectivity in a conscious attitude to life.
However, the idea of a perfect natural religion doesn't correspond to much that's substantial in reality.
Man may naturally form a reasonable idea of the one, single, incorporeal, unchangeable, immeasurable, infinite and eternal supreme Being that no concrete image can ever represent because its omnipotence, truth, goodness, beauty, life and happiness are transcendent above all things earthly.
But how many people can take possession of this high knowledge on their own strength?
Our speculative mind may ascertain beyond doubt that man is able to know on his own strength, at least by approximation, the many great rights our Creator has to his reasonable creature.
But, what's possible doesn't always happen.
Indeed, where is the natural genius who needs no help from others to become convinced that all human rights are subordinate to the higher rights of God almighty? And in how many people did the intellectual acknowledgement of God's monopoly give existence and form to the practical consciousness that man has no real choice between being subservient to God or to himself, because, when serving God, he serves himself the best? On the other hand, don't the distinct lives of people show it's much easier to form a good idea of God's right to man and man's duty toward God than to serve God in full surrender of the whole person?
It's comparative theology that has a sufficient answer to these questions.
The facts are speaking for themselves. We need not resort to dark suspicions and conjectures like students of rationalistic theology, for example Tylor, Spencer, Frazer and King, to be sure that people, if left alone with their own weak faculties, don't dissent in anything so much as in the domain of religious confession and cult.
Although we may be confident that a convinced atheist is rare and that there are no peoples that don't know any religious dogma or rite, yet we can hardly deny that all distinct natural religions have a very chauvinistic colour and display an originality due to artificial contamination from outside rather than to an unforced natural efficacy of man's own spirit and will.
The primitive have a special preference for magical practice. The old Egyptians could easily bridge the great contrast between the highest and lowest forms of religious cult. Semitic polytheism was a polytheism of the worst kind. Persian radical dualism must seem strange and rare to any sober observer. The amalgam of religious convictions in China, shintoistic mysticism in Japan, dreamy pantheism of the brahmans and the deep speculations about reincarnation of Buddhists, they all reveal their connection to blood and soil as much as the anthropomorphic religion of the old Greeks and the primitive worship of nature of the old Germanic, Slavic and Celtic peoples.
Leave alone the struggle of opinions as to natural morality!
J.Bricout may be right when he writes: "Il ne se trouve pas de religion complètement fausse, entièrement mauvaise".
But we need not therefore change anything in Saint Paul's judgement when he writes:
"Although they knew God, they didn't honour and thank Him as God; but their speculations came to nothing and their ill-judged hearts were darkened. They called themselves wise and became foolish; they exchanged the glory of God immortal for an image that resembles a man or birds or four-footed and creeping beasts ... They exchanged God's truth for a lie and preferred to honour and serve creatures rather than the Creator who should be praised in all eternity ... And because they despised the knowledge about God, God delivered them up to their humiliating instincts, so that they do what isn't right ... "

{{In the non-Christian world, it's a striking phenomenon that it's the primitive peoples without much culture that turned out to be most capable to defend their religious conviction against the error of an impossible polytheism.
Although comparative theology is still in its infancy and students of the history of religion see themselves placed before many great secrets, especially if he considers the religions of the primitive, yet now it has appeared with sufficient certainty that almost all primitive peoples believe in the existence of a transcendent and allmighty God, who may be kindly disposed or ill-disposed to man according to his noble or evil behaviour.
We may have a right to ask in relation to rare peoples like the Inca people, whether Pachacamac has enough divine properties to call him the one and only God, but on the other hand we know for sure that the question about monotheism of primitive peoples has become almost everywhere else irrelevant. For the concept of the one and only God who controls and reigns everything - the All-Father - apparently was everywhere and always the base of primitive religious cult, although it didn't represent all perfections the Christians, Jews, Mohammedans or spiritualistic philosophers credit it with, and in public life the superstitious practice prevailed of animism, manism, fetishism, totemism or magic.

A) Among the South-African Khoin-tribes, which ethnologists usually rank together with Patagonians and Australian aboriginals at the lowest level of human civilization, it's the Namas (Hottentots), San (Bushmen), Makolongs and Pygmys that of old have had a rather clear concept of the 'great Head' they worship as Goenja, Kaang or Kage.
In the Bantu regions, all tribes that separated themselves from the original Bantu community, managed to preserve their belief in the one and only God, Mulungu, whom the Marutse call Nambe, the Bayanzi Ndsakumba, the Ewe Mawu. He is the mighty maker and great lord, to whom man's fate and everything else is subject.
The negro tribes in Sudan have a concept of God that is the purer as the tribes have moved farther to the north. The Gabun negros call Aniambia the Lord of everything. The Gold Coast inhabitants consider Jankom-Pon the procreator and reigner of all things existing. The Jorubas in South Nigeria honour Olorun as the god of heaven, who called all things to existence and controls everything highhandedly. Moreover, the Ibos consider Tiuku the rewarder of all good and the punisher of all evil.
In the Nilot region we can't discover many signs of a public religious life, but among all tribes of Diur, Bongo, Madi, Masai and Oromo the idea of a supreme being does exist: they call it En-Gnai or Waka.
In the American regions, the eldest peoples like the Red Indians, the Inland Selish tribes, the central northern Californians, the indigenous inhabitants of Virginia, the Pawnee, the Zunji and the aboriginals of Massachussets have their own supreme being, which they call Algonkin, Ahonee, Tirawa, Awona-Vilona or Kiethan. They think he is the procreator and father of all beings.
In the far south, the distinct tribes of Patagonians, among which the Yamana of Tierra del Fuego, worship Watauwinewa as the highest god. In the imagination of the people, Watauwinewa is alive as the great mysterious man who from his seat behind the mountains is overseeing and controlling all life, or as the highest heavenly spirit, on whom we can rely in all circumstances of life because of his everlasting care.
For some time, ethnologists thought the aboriginals of the Australian continent had no religion at all. However, nowadays they acknowledge that this people, too, does believe in some God, although for the rest it has very little culture.
Durkheim was already able to show with many ethnologic documents the Australians worship a unique and transcendent supreme being, bearing many names like Bunjil, Daramulun, Bajamee, Mungangaua, Nurundere, Altpira, Nuralie. And father Wilhelm Schmidt, in his standard work about the origin of the concept 'God', called attention to the remarkable fact it's the tribes with least development that have the best idea of God.
With the Polynesians, Melanesians and Micronesians, we find a concept of God that reminds us of the Greek supreme God, Zeus. With the Polynesians, the grand and mighty God of heaven, before whose power and goodness people feel needy children, is called Tangolao, Tangorao, Taarao, or Kanaloa.

B) Compared with the naive and undeveloped but still reasonable forms of religious thinking of primitive tribes, the religious conviction of the so-called non-Christian peoples of culture is making an impression that's as degenerate as complicate.
We may call Islam with its monotheistic theology an exception, because the followers of Mohammed confess they believe in Allah, the one, infinite and almighty Creator and Ruler of all things existing. However, we should not forget that Mohammedan theology, of which the essential parts have been written down in the Koran, would not have been conceivable without presupposing Judaism, Christianity and Gnosticism.
As opposed to Islam, the other non-Christian religions of Semitic descent, like those of old Egypt, Babylon and Assyria, were clearly polytheistic.
Although the old Egyptians may have considered the Heliopolis local sun god Re, identified later on with the Theban god Amon, the supreme god and ruler over gods and people, yet other gods claimed godly rights, too, like Thot, Ptah, Khnoem and during later dynasties Osiris and Isis.
The religion of the Babylonians, which the Assyrians copied rather accurately, honoured Marduk (who was named Assur in Assyria) as a supreme god. But, although Marduk had developed in due course of time to become superior to the other gods and goddesses, he could not completely struggle out of his bondage to the cosmos, so that, in the final end, he became the head of an immeasurable pantheon that was bearing an explicitly cosmogonic and astrologic character.

C) In the far East, Taoism, Confucianism and Buddhism were from the beginning no real religions, although people often call them religions.
Lao-Tse built a system in which he presents a pantheistic view on the world. It does recognize a supreme being, tao, but this being is lacking all properties of a personal God who is transcendent above nature. Tao was the first monad, primeval domain and pervading force through which every thing has its existence and significance.
The doctrine of Kung-Fu-Tse reminds us of taoism in many respects. It may perhaps have a more theistic colour, in so far as it confesses a belief in a deity that reigns over life and death and is the source of all light. Yet it's pantheistic doctrine of tao that forms the most essential part of Confucianism.
Buddhism has even less to do with religion than Taoism and Confucianism. It's a philosophy of life, or rather an attitude to life that's basing itself on the fourfold atheistic law of karma. Buddhism doesn't know any deity, not even a divine principle that resembles tao to some degree.
As opposed to the foregoing, the Chinese native religion and the Japanese Shinto are rooted in a theistic world of thoughts, in which people assume a duality between divine and human forces. The Chinese are supporting the official religion of the state. which believes in a strange composition of Confucian and Buddhistic thoughts and mythological and mysticistic ideas. There is little originality in it, so it displays the faults of all alleged religions it derived something essential from.
The Japanese state religion, Shinto, with its gods (Izanagi, Izanami, Amaterazu, Tzukiyomi, Suzanovo, and countless others), its demigods (kami), its spirits of nature (tengu), and demons (yomi), is so far apart from momotheism that every shintoist can keep his own god.

D) Among the Indo-European religions, Hinduism is farthest away from monotheism. The old vedic data seem to indicate that in the Aryo-Indian religion people adored Dyâus Pitâ, standing high above everything as the supreme god, with Varuna, Vayû and Indra standing at his side.
In the Brahman period that followed, the gods gradually lost their personal character. Vishnu and Shiva were in their concrete shapes a concession to popular phantasy rather than an object of religious worship for Brahma priests, who were bent for speculative thought. Brahmanism made the old Indian religion a pantheism, in which people considered brahma an imminent primitive force that's giving each thing its essence and each man his personality.
Finally, Brahmanism degenerated even further, to become contemporary Hinduism: a bizarre mix of brahman reminiscences, buddhistic elements and mysticistic explanations.
The most characteristic element of Zarathustra's religion, which is mainly answered for in the Avesta, was the strictly dualistic doctrine of the realms of good and evil.
Ahura (later Ormazd or Ormuzd) was the infinite and allknowing king of the good realm. In his government, he got help from the Ameshas-Spentas, who represented his distinct divine properties, and the yazatas, gods of a lesser kind, among who Mitra got the place of honor next Ormazd in later Parsism.
The ruler of the evil realm, Ahriman, threatened the innocence and happiness of the people, and his helpers were the daêvas (fighters for evil), yatûs (evil spirits) and pairikas (seducers).
The religion of old Greece was bearing an explicitly polytheistic character from the very beginning. Its gods had mostly been taken from the old Mycene religion or imported from elsewhere.
During the homeric era, Uranos, the god of heaven, had to surrender the first place to Zeus, who maintained absolute power over all other gods during a long time.
Ever since the eighth century before Christ, Zeus' son Apollon enjoyed an exceptionally high veneration. From the sacred oracle city Delphi, he decided about the future of the people and guarded their morals and culture.
Later on, the cult of Dionysius was transferred from Thracia to Greece, and hence the worship of the mysteries began on Greek soil and stayed there for a long time.
The religion of the Romans was closely related to that of the Greeks.
According to myth, Janus was the founder of it. He enjoyed divine honour together with his spouse Diana.
But, in due course of time, Jupiter pushed him aside. He was identical to the supreme god of the Greeks. (Compare the name Jupiter with Dyâus-Pitâ, Zeus Patèr, Deus Pater.) Jupiter decides about the fate of gods and men, supported by a considerable amount of gods, who are all of Greek descent: Apollo (Apollon), Mars (Ares), Vulcanus (Hephaistos), Ceres (Demeter), Venus (Aphrodite) and Vesta (Hestia).
We have but little certainty about the religion of the old Germans.
The old runes, the Latin historians and the Edda offer only vague datums about the properties of the gods, who didn't represent a constant image in ever evolving German life.
Anyhow, Wodan (Odin) was standing at the head of the extensive world of gods. He was God of war and thunder and had his Valkyries guide the spirits of the deceased into Valhalla.
Tyr (also called Ziu, that is the same word again as Diâus, Zeus and Deus) was probably the oldest god of the Germans, but afterwards he became a mere god of war. Donar (Thor) was the formidable but reliable god of storm and oath. Wodan's spouse Freya (Frigg) defended marriage. The gods Freyr and Niord and the goddess Nerthus provided food and a good digestion, while Balder, god of light, was to herald a new era of prosperity after the worldwide war.

E) We hope the survey we gave, although it was too short to make the religions appear to full advantage, may suffice to ascertain that human mind, which from a philosophical point of view can independently ascend to true knowledge and confession of the one and only transcendental God, was never able to discover the ideal natural religion. There are so many factors of a cultural or social character that make man choose facility above effort, and more factors of a different kind, which we can find in a sort of common schizophrenia of human mind, like phantasy, sentiment, passion, and a prediliction for tangible reality, which make him shrink from quiet, openminded and communicative reflection upon the eternal and imperishable values imposed on human life.
We may think it doesn't matter what we believe, as long as we honestly confess our belief and shape our life to it.
But the bad news is that man is feeling responsible for his belief, if only because a wrong belief imposes wrong norms for practical morals in life.
Moreover ... , although we may try to forget it, the question of truth, which is a question about divine right and human duty, continues to exist.}}

God's preference

Among the many natural religions the world knows, there's one that's enjoying God's visible preference, because it best answers for the moral actions and ritual behaviour it prescribes, starting from a transcendental concept of God that honours both the Creator and the reasonable creature. Or isn't there?
This question must evoke the interest of every person who, equipped with a good intellectual development and free from any nationalistic prejudice, wants to give form and content to his life and is honestly searching for the highest norms for human practice of duty.
How should man serve God, and in which religious community?
The answer of the philosophers is very saddening!
"Ignoramus et ignorabimus" - "We don't know and we shall never know", that's all even the best thinkers can say, when they want to find their way in the problem of man's highest duties, using the power of natural reason only.
Although it's true natural reason does possess in itself the strength to independently ascend to the most important truths about God's omnipotence and goodness and about man's dependence on his Creator and Preserver, it's also true that, in fact, man's thinking is always being influenced by thousands of disturbing factors that make it necessary his reason should get help from outside to be able to completely cover the troublesome road to full truth.
We don't detract from the fame of philosophers like Plato and Aristotle when we say they may have acquired in all other questions a better insight than in the first questions of theodicy and natural ethics.
Cicero makes Tullius speak clear words about this:
"The question of the nature of the gods is dark indeed ... Most philosophers said there do exist gods. Protagoras was doubting about it, Diagoras of Melos and Theodoros of Cyrene thought there doesn't exist any god. However, the opinions of the philosophers who said gods do exist are so divergent and contradict each other so often we could hardly calculate the number of distinct opinions."

Whoever is searching for the right Religion, isn't content with abstract theology and speculative ethics only. He looks at life before all: full life, which developed out of religious conviction and through which man is consciously aiming at his highest ideal.
Where do we find such a life, full of harmony and firm of principle, which serves God properly?
With the leaders of the people? With the people itself? Perhaps with the philosophers?
Cicero informs us about this in a way that leaves nothing to imagination:
"How rare is the philosopher who is behaving like reason requires? In fact, some of them exhibit such a shallowness and frivolity we should say they'd better not train their intellect. Some are desiring money or glory, many are slaves to their carnal lust, and hence their words are queerly contradicting their life."
To affirm his complaint, Cicero could have given many eloquent examples. He could have pointed at the immortal Plato, who in his moral doctrine promised little good for women and backward children. He could have referred to the innamable delusions concerning human rights and duties that in times long ago became popular even among the most capable philosophers.
But did "independent" thinkers much better, later on?
We can only deny it.
Indeed, how great is the uncertainty among the independent philosophers, who are trying to study the problems of the origins and continuation of human life.
How divergent are their opinions, especially as to knowledge of the things of God!
There are many scepticists, like Bayle, Hume, Montaigne and Charron; and positivists, like Comte, Stuart-Mill, Spencer, Littré, Lafitte, Taine, Laas, Ziegler, Jodl, Vaihinger, Ziehen, Ardigò; furthermore pantheists like Spinoza, Lessing, Herder, Fichte, Schelling, Hegel, Krause, Vacherot, Lotze, Fechner, Paulsen; and there are materialists like Lamettrie, Holbach, d'Alembert, Strausz, Feuerbach, Stirner, Vogt, Büchner, Moleschott, Haeckel, Kalthoff, Ostwald, Goldscheid. However, it's difficult to trace a great philosopher whom God gave the talent to rise on his own strength via metaphysics to the transcendental height of God.
Since their concept of God isn't safely resting on the faultless principles of sensory experience and causality, they can't produce natural ethics worth its name in all respects, either. Somebody might advance we shouldn't seek the rightfulness of a natural religion in a philosophical system but in the existing religions themselves.
There's a germ of truth in this observation.
Nature often wrests itself from the restrictions and shortcomings of a law human mind invented and prescribed. There are more factors than contemplative intellect alone that determine the genesis and development of religious life. It occurred several times that religious practice of the followers overtook and improved the norms from the doctrine of a religion founder.
But we should be able to answer for our practice before the forum of reason. If the practice is religious indeed, religious conviction must bear it. For it's not arbitrary what the religious man is doing. It's important which consciousness and intention is steering our actions. We don't measure the value of a religion by counting the number of prayers and sacrifices or by looking at the splendour of outward appearances, but by considering the degree in which the followers are consciously fulfilling the requirements of God's own rights in their prayers and sacrifices and in their whole outward cult.
There are people who like everything that enchants the senses, who are moved to tears by a Sacramental procession or a funeral ceremony, but don't understand the deeper sense of these outward manifestations. They are content with the surface. They are misjudging the reasonableness which must lie at the base of all religious deeds. In the practice of a sentimental religion that is both inconstant and indeterminate, they are seeking satisfaction for their own sentimental desires rather than fulfilment of the rightful demands God imposes upon man.
Such an attitude to life is contradictory to truth and to well regulated love.
We may admire any people that draws from its selfrighteous religious conviction inspiration to create striking monuments of culture, but we should admire a nation even more if its level of cultural development is revealing a religious conviction that strives after God's ideals rather than its own ideals.
We may find high esthetical joy when witnessing a ceremony at Bali, or seeing the Boro-Budur, or hearing the exotic funeral songs of central Africa, but religious art should honour truth before all. It shouldn't be only a visualisation of selfconceit, allbeit unconscious selfconceit. It should be more than a kind of profane play to listen to or to watch. It should fully answer its task, that is: serving the one and only true God.
The question that is absorbing everything else, which must engage and worry all serious searchers for truth, is: in which religion do the adherents rightly serve the Creator and Lord of the world?
It's hard to find the ideal natural religion.
Where do we find a mature natural concept of God?
In the Vedas? In the Avesta? In the Koran? In the Kojiki? In the Eddas?
In the religious conviction of the Parsists or Buddhists? With the confessors of Chinese popular religion? Or in the primitive cult of the South African Khoin tribes or the Pategonians or the Polynesians?
We may seek the true natural concept of God everywhere, but find it nowhere.

As to the natural doctrine of morality, things are not much better. Nobody is competent to judge of the moral behaviour of fellow people or to condemn it as sinful according to his own standard which these fellow people don't know. Yet we may feel really sorry for the uncountable number of people with a worried mind who have not enough insight in the first truths a man should know and hence are often leading a life that makes the king of creation a slave of his passions.
In our days, there are as many moral delusions as in the times of Socrates and Plato, and they are as abominable.
There is no "independent" philosopher who has a good solution for all problems of life.
There is no natural religion in which all good and beautiful properties of man show to full advantage and all lower things are consciously shunned because they are unworthy of man .
"C'est triste, un pays non-chrétien."

Meanwhile, the relative truths and certainties man can independently acquire give him little to go by, although he may ever so diligently make the most of his intellectual talents. His insight in the laws that control world and man rarely surpasses the superficiality of a vague surmise. And he stands only a poor chance of acquiring the one and only big object of his life, although he may ever so hard keep trying.
Those who found to their cost what it means to stand alone between all human efforts to find the true form of religion, while delivered up to the weak and erroneous attempts of own judgment and to the wild and whimsical inclinations of our natural urge of life, are convinced that man has no other way to be able to acknowledge the one and only God and to rightly honour Him than to beseech the Giver of all good and light.
Saint Augustine is the classical example of a man with a worried mind who keeps tirelessly searching for certainty in deeper knowledge of things divine and in harmonic development of a steady line of life. He doesn't seek this certainty and this harmonic life in the triviality of his own weak forces, but in the love of his Lord and God:
"Up, Lord, and do; stir us up, and recall us; kindle and draw us; inflame, grow sweet unto us, let us now love, let us run."
When philosophy and science can't help Augustine, nor art and rhetoric, and when neither manicheism nor scepticism or platonism can sufficiently answer the questions of the origins and the sense of evil, he humbles himself before God in the privacy of his Milanese garden, and asks for release from his fears in immediate intimacy with God. He complains:
"How long yet? Tomorrow? Always tomorrow? Why not now?"
God comes to the help of the seeking man. When fellow people can't offer relief, the Source of all light can give advice and courage:
"I hear a voice from the adjacent house ... a voice as a boy's or girl's, I don't know: take, read; take, read."
Augustine takes the book of the apostle of the heathen, opens it .. and the first words he reads are a release already:
"A light of safety was shed into my heart, so to speak, and all darkness and doubt fled away."

Augustine isn't the only seeker who in an endless love for truth wished to give a richer content and sharper outline to the vague concept of God that natural reason could independently attain.
After all, all people are seekers of truth.
However, those people who already found the truth, are not often convinced it's the greatest benefaction a man can ask and that it's giving the great safety and high peace that man is naturally longing for.
Those people who don't possess truth yet, because they keep seeking it in the shallowness of wordly lie and human talk, though they may be confident since they are too shortsighted to see how shortsighted they are, will sooner or later experience the insufficiency of their own lives, and see they fail to do their duties and acquire their rights.
Numerous people who have become obsessed by their love of truth, are asking together with Sain Augustine: "To whom shall we go?"
To ourselves? To the selfcomplacency with our own judgment, which stays helpless without the help of others, especially regarding the most important truths of the origin and object of our life: God?
To our fellow people?
But these suffer as much from the blurring, blinding and benumbing influence of earthly worries as we ourselves.
To whom shall we go?
We need some courage to separate ourselves from the world, as Saint Augustine did, to venture going close to God, and humble ourselves before the Lord as a useless servant, and beg for light upon the many things uncertain concerning true religion, which continue to exist in our independent minds despite of troublesome efforts:
"Up, Lord, and do; stir us up, and recall us; kindle and draw us; inflame, grow sweet unto us ..."