Mark Pine

On C-SPAN’s Book TV this weekend, Stephen Prothero, the author of “God Is Not One,” answered questions from Sally Quinn, a reporter on religion and faith for the Washington Post. The book is “about the eight rival religions that run the word,” Prothero says in a YouTube clip. He describes the divergent beliefs, practices, and goals of the religions, and he says provocatively that it’s not good or right to “pretend that the religions are basically the same”—a phrase used both in the clip and in the Book TV interview.

In writing of religious differences, the author says he seeks to counter the widespread ignorance of faiths other than one’s own and to increase “religious literacy.” In that worthy goal, he sounds like the scientists who bemoan and hope to correct illiteracy with respect to science. But he goes beyond writing a volume on comparative religion, and he asserts that emphasizing any fundamental commonalities among the world’s religions is a actually a bad idea—motivated by the misguided, simplistic thinking of multiculturalists who want us all to get along—which prevents us from understanding and respecting the world’s religiously diverse peoples. (Imagine a scientist who opposed work on a unified field theory because doing so prevented understanding of the separate sciences.)

The differences are important, Prothero says, because religion has a hugely powerful influence on individuals and society, and we should recognize that different peoples belief divergent and sometime conflicting things. Yet,“I am not a ‘clash of civilizations’ guy,” he told a Huffington Post reviewer, referring to Samuel P. Huntington’s thesis that the diverse cultural and religious identities of peoples constitutes the primary driver of conflict in today’s world.

In fact, however, the Huntington concept is a likely outcome of Prothero’s way of thinking. He sees the major world religions as being in competition. Just as ideologies compete to determine the political systems of the world’s nations—each one believing its goals and structures are the best—so the world’s religions assert the unique truth of the reality they describe. And in both cases, history shows, viewpoints like that lead to wars.

Prothero’s problem is focusing on the trees rather than the forest. He goes wrong in asserting the rightness of his inquiry over studies of commonalities. (Does it make more sense to study the characteristics individual species rather than the properties of the biosphere as a whole?)

Underlying almost all religions is a human quest for contact with existence beyond the material world. It is the almost universal sense that there is something there. In different places, times and societies, groups of people have sought to fulfill that quest with unique sets of beliefs and traditions. Of course, the content of their separate religions reflects the most pressing daily problems of the particular circumstances of their lives.

But the quest is nearly universal. Wise authors, seeking to promote peace on earth rather than discord, will emphasize the shared beliefs and goals as much as the differences.

Consider one example, one of the most difficult points of contention among the Abrahamic religions—the question of the divinity of Jesus. One way of looking at the issue is to see it as a conflict of religions. Christianity is right in believing Jesus is God, or Judaism is right in denying that, or Islam is right in seeing him as a prophet preceding the culminating one, Mohammed. In the conflict view, only one of the religions is correct.

Yet, each of the three religions sees God as a non-material existence, a spiritual entity. And each of them sees humans as having a non-material, spiritual entity within, the highest component of their being. And it’s clear that in this spiritual function, some human beings are much more godlike than others. In mathematics there is the concept of the limit of a function: a function approaches its limit if the distance between it and the limit is less than any finite amount.

We can have it thus about God, Jesus and Mohammed, and we might satisfy each of the religions that way. Does it matter greatly if a particular spirit or two are so close to God that it is not possible to specify how distant they are from him? And if not, then perhaps also the differences among the religions do not matter so greatly, either.

Last March, a study done by the NIH and AARP, published in the Archives of Internal Medicine, looked at diet and health in half a million middle-aged and older Americans. Those who ate 4 ounces of red meat or more per day had a 30% higher mortality rate during the next 10 years. Health is certainly one thing to consider when deciding whether to eat meat.

Another thing one might consider is energy cost. According to Appropedia , a web wiki devoted to sustainable living issues, production of a pound of beef releases 14 times as much CO₂ as a pound of fruits and vegetables. And a Wikipedia article compares the energy cost of producing animal protein to that required for plant protein:

The production of protein from grain-fed animals requires eight times as much fossil-fuel energy as the production of plant protein. … Typical feedlot husbandry of cattle requires an input of 35 kcal of fossil fuel to produce one kcal of food energy in beef, far more than that required for comparable plants.

In addition, many people (myself included) consider moral issues in deciding whether to eat meat. Yesterday, in the NY Times, Gary Steiner, a philosopher at Bucknell, raised the issue of how animals are treated on farms. In deciding whether to eat meat, he asks if we should be concerned whether the flesh we consume comes from animals that spend their lives in cages or pens, unable to wandering, feed, and reproduce.

But though he is concerned about the treatment of farm animals, that is not Steiner’s main objection. In his view:

Most people just don’t care about the lives or fortunes of animals. If they did care, they would learn as much as possible about the ways in which our society systematically abuses animals, and they would make what is at once a very simple and a very difficult choice: to forswear the consumption of animal products of all kinds.

Steiner is a ethical vegan, someone who chooses to eat no meat whatsoever because of he believes it is immoral. He writes that some people don’t object to animals suffering on farms because they don’t believe the suffering of animals is on the same level as human suffering. Some others cite religious justifications for using animals as food.

And dealing with a third common justification, Steiner writes, “Others argue that the human capacity for abstract thought makes us capable of suffering that both qualitatively and quantitatively exceeds the suffering of any non-human animal.” On the other hand, “people who are ethical vegans believe that differences in intelligence between human and non-human animals have no moral significance whatsoever.”

I agree with Steiner to some extent. I believe society and science have progressed to the point that we can no longer ignore many issues in deciding what to eat, questions regarding human health and environmental consequences. And we can no longer close our eyes to the treatment of animals on farms, as some journalists have described.

About four years ago, I decided to refrain from eating the meat of land animals. As a physician, most of my concern at that time came from worries over my long-term health as I grow old. But also I was and continue to be troubled by the terrible treatment of animals on industrial farms and the degradation of the environment around those animal factories.

However, I’ve decided to draw the line at a different place from Steiner. I continue to eat fish and shellfish. One reason is that fish oils have been shown to be good for the cardiovascular system.

Moreover, unlike Steiner, I do think intelligence is relevant in deciding what to eat. It’s my guess that most land animals, both mammals and birds, are more intelligent than most fish, and certainly more intelligent than shellfish.

The capacity of an animal for intelligent reflection, in my view, confers moral value. I don’t object to killing insects or using worms for fish bait. I don’t object to fishing, although I am concerned about those fishermen who do so just for sport, returning the fish to the water after making a catch. And since I don’t think plants possess a capacity for reflective intelligence, I have no objection to eating fruits or vegetables.

Steiner might contend that my placing value on the capacity for intelligent reflection comes from my human perspective, since that’s what we humans excel in and value highly. I wouldn’t disagree. But I would ask him why as an ethical vegan, he draws the line between animals and plants. Plants are alive as animals are, yet he is willing to kill plants for food. If intelligence is not his basis for his making that distinction, then I wonder what what is?