In addition, logical, historic, and systemic arguments
will be employed to clarify what religions have in common.
In anticipation of a short history, it should be clarified that
living in a religion of one God (such as Judaism, Christianity,
Islam), or of many (as the Hindu world entertains), or of a
mixture of pantheism and mysticism (as in the Chinese or Japanese
worlds), even living in animism, does not imply identification
with its history, nor even with its national or ethnic confines
or premises. Islamic enthusiasm and Christian retreat in our day
is not a matter of the validity of one religion over the other,
but rather a matter of their pragmatic significance. United in
accepting Allah as their God, or a broadly defined way of living
according to the Koran, Moslims are far less united than the
less religious, and less homogeneous, Christians. But in giving
up the clear-cut distinctions between right and wrong, and
especially involving relativity in the search for options
leading to higher efficiency, we constitute ourselves in a
framework of vagueness and relativity-different from the
transcendental value of Hinduism, or from the clear-cut values
of contemporary Islam-which can no longer rely on the certainty
embodied in literacy-based praxis, and which leads us to subject
human existence to doubt.
In realizing the broad consequences of a pragmatics based on the
desire to achieve levels of efficiency appropriate to a given
scale of human experience, we can understand why some conflicts
involving forces identifying themselves with religions from the
past against forces of the present appear as religious conflicts.
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