I
have been asked, at various times, how does Pandeism take into account and explain "
exclusive claims" of various "figures of
theological history" that their particular way and belief is the only
true way?
There are a
number of
levels to that -- firstly, a lot of assertedly "exclusive" claims aren't definitively exclusive after all, especially considering that the
words attributed to such figures are often not even words written in their own
hand, but accounts passed down through evolving (even competing) oral histories. Different claims that have been thought to be exclusive have turned out to be
hybrids of elements of other precedent mythologies. To some extent this has led to efforts to rewrite history, so that the claimant can insist that the precedent myth is actually later in time than the claims which came after it, sometimes to absurd results when there is language in the later ones obliquely referring to the older ones as being the older ones. It has even been suggested, for example, that
Greek mythology was inspired by the Christian
Bible, even though the Bible references several figures from Greek mythology by name as beings believed in by cultures precedent to those of the Bible writers!!
And in many cases there is no such things as a purely historical exclusivity in
play -- for example, if we presume that an account such as the one in the
Book of Mormon is historically 100% true as to events experienced in
the Americas (though I note I have seen at least one theorist claim the events occurred in
Australia), there is no reason at all why the account in the
Bhagavad Gita could not be equally true as to events specifically in
India. Nothing in either account affirmatively states that the other is untrue. And as to purely ideological interpretations -- every
scripture known to man has its internal
calendar running alongside its internal
contradictions. One measure of
faith is being able to deem claims true despite internal contradictions. But if this is so, then an even greater measure of faith would arise in being able to deem all the claims of all the religions
simultaneously true (or as true as they can simultaneously be) despite
seeming contradictions between them.
And undergirding all of this remains the possibility of a pandeistic model. If, as the
logic of
Pandeism suggests, all things are part of and within an
unconscious or otherwise unintervening
Creator, then everything we
experience, every
miracle or
vision or
revelation or spiritual
emotion or any other metaphysical
phenomenon, could be explained as an unwittingly-projected projection from within, one encompassing the
hopes or
fears or
biases of the projecting person (or even people, collectively). Consider the ultimate of which we speak. Is it possible for the finite mind of any human to comprehend the incomprehensibly vast mind of our Creator? Especially if the Creator-mind encompasses all human minds which ever were or are or will be or even can be?
Here we get to something like the story of
the six blind men and the elephant, each only able to feel a certain aspect of it and projecting that to the whole. But what if instead of the elephant in that story (which apparently doesn't bother to do much to explain itself) we have an unconscious
Universe-force, even one only a few
billion times bigger than a normal
elephant? Nobody touching it anywhere would garner anything resembling the truth. And what if this force is malleable to the minds that touch it, so that they not only experience something different from each other, but in touching it they cause it to assume some characteristics of what they want to experience (or expect to, whether they want it or not, or even fear to or hope to without consciously knowing this is their hope or fear).
So in the first instance the person touching this energy will think they have a sense of the whole when they only touch part, since even that part is something vastly bigger than can be understood. And in the second instance, that part they touch will reflect their own unwitting
influence on it. And in the third instance, what they have, then, to convey to others about this experience will be impossible to convey except by
analogy and hopelessly inexact
description. And in the fourth instance, the followers who hear this account will hear it with their own interpretation, and pass it on thusly.
And lastly, beyond all of this, there is a great "
so what?" Every religion has claims exclusive to that religion, or it wouldn't
be a religion separate from any others at all. So to point to a claim of a particular religion and declare it to be exclusive that religion is simply to acknowledge this feature of religions in general, and so to inherently dismiss it as a point of
significance on its own.