From my World Religions Course Notes:
Divine Wheel Model: The model that asserts that the approach to final unity/acceptance/salvation with the divine is best illustrated by the image of a wheel with a hub, the rim, and spokes. The hub in the center represents the divine center, the outside rim represents mankind living life, and the spokes represent various religious traditions as equally viable paths to the divine. In this model, all religions are legitimate ways to get to spiritual apotheosis.
This model is held by lots of folks, whether they articulate it as such or not. Anyone who says that all religions are about the same thing and will get you to the same place is teaching this model.
The model and what it teaches sounds nice, because it allows everyone the possibility of a positive eternity leaving no one to a negative eternal state to look forward to. Everyone is cool in the end. Sounds nice, doesn’t it?
There are a few problems with it though. One problem is that many of these religions say very contrary things and some teaching are completely contradictory. By the very definition of the term ‘contradictory”, two contradictory claims cannot both be true at the same time in the same universe. Therefore many of the claims in these various religions must be false.
Another problem is that all three of the Western religions (Judaism, Christianity, and Islam) claim that they are the only way to salvation, excluding all others. Therefore, the Wheel Theory (which really is a religion itself) cannot be true unless all three of these religions are false. If any one of these three religions are true, the others are false – including the Wheel Theory.
A third problem has to do with the source of the claim. How did this claim of the Wheel Theory come to be known? The only possible source of such is a mind that sits outside the universe and declares the Wheel Theory to be true. How, when, and where did this Divine mind declare this to mankind? Its easy to sit and simply declare it to be true, but to defend it – when someone asks how you know it to be true – was by saying, “ you just know it”, it doesn’t carry a lot of weight. If I made the claim that left-handed people are intellectually, morally, and spiritually superior over right-handers, and my only defense was, “I just know it”, it would tough to get converts.
The only being that can know for sure which religion is the correct religion is the creator of the universe – the one who made it and knows how it operates.
The important question is, how do we sort that our with our puny brains?
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