Finishing up Karen Armstrong's The Spiral Staircase last night, I ran across this paragraph:
The one and only test of a valid religious idea, doctrinal statement, spiritual experience, or devlotional practice was that it must lead directly to practical compassion. If your understanding of the divine made you kinder, more empathetic, and impelled you to express this sympathy in concrete acts of loving-kindness, this was good theology. But if your notion of God made you unkind, belligerent, cruel, or self-righteous, or if it led you to kill in God's name, it was bad theology. Compassion was the litmus test for the prophets of Israel, for the rabbis of the Talmud, for Jesus, for Paul, and for Muhammad, not to mention Confucious, Lao-Tzu, the Buddha, or the sages of the Upinishads. In killing Muslims and Jews in the name of God, the Crusaders had simply projected their own fear and loathing onto a diety which they had created in their own image and likeness, thereby giving this hatred a seal of absolute approval. A personalized God can easily lead to this type of idolatry, which is why the more thoughtful Jews, Christians and Muslims insisted that while you could begin by thinking of God as a person, God transcended personality as "he" went beyond all other human categories.
I don't agree that this is the only test of validity for a religion, but it's certainly a big one. I also think that the operative statement here is "your understanding." Sometimes—often, in fact—the theology is fine; its our understanding of it that's faulty. Armstrong tends to downplay the usefulness of reason in the practice of religion, but I think both reason and faith are vital, and in about equal measures. They invoke different parts of our intelligence and they often tug at one another in disturbing ways, not so much as contradictory thoughts or ideas, but contradictory ways of looking at the world. One part wants tangible proof of everything, the other knows and accepts that some things aren't subject to proof or reason, and that there are other faculties of "knowing." This is why the love and compassion part is so important, because everyone is at a different stage in that process of "knowing," and without compassion, it's easy to be self-righteous and vindictive about "their" mistakes (like you never made any in your own journey).
Reason tells you there's a unifying theme in the Book, whatever book it is; faith tells you that even though you don't understand all of it yet, it's the right way to structure your life; love makes you want to share what you've found and be patient with all the people who just think you're a deluded fruitcake. All three qualities need to work together, or you get the kind of religious nut who will kill people in the name of God.
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