Representatives of five world religions compared notes on
God, evil and eternity in a recent panel discussion at Houston Baptist University.
More than 250 students attended the three-hour World Religions
Forum, which organizers said was planned to foster understanding. At the gathering,
speakers addressed three questions: Who is God? Why is there evil and suffering
in this life? What is the ultimate destiny of human life?
Representatives of five world religions compared notes on
God, evil and eternity in a recent panel discussion at Houston Baptist University.
More than 250 students attended the three-hour World Religions
Forum, which organizers said was planned to foster understanding. At the gathering,
speakers addressed three questions: Who is God? Why is there evil and suffering
in this life? What is the ultimate destiny of human life?
The Jewish perspective was represented by Rabbi Stuart Federow,
spiritual leader of Shaar Hashalom in Clear Lake City, Texas. He said the Hebrew
Scriptures reveal a God who is one, indivisible, unique, without form, omnipotent
and different from man.
“We are to love God, obey God, to be ever conscious about
God and loyal to God,” he said.
The Christian view was represented by Duane Brooks, pastor
of Tallowood Baptist Church in Houston. He described God as one deity with three
expressions in the Father, Son and Holy Spirit. “We know that Jesus Christ
is God not only because Scripture teaches that but because Jesus uniquely claimed
that,” he said.
Brooks said humans were made to have a relationship with God,
and that is possible through faith in Jesus.
On the other hand, a nun from the Chung Mei Buddhist Temple
in Stafford, insisted God is everywhere and may be found in every person.
“In Buddhism, you could be the Buddha,” Miao Hong
said. “Im the Buddha.”
A Hindu perspective also was offered by Sri Gaurang Nanavaty,
teacher at Chinmaya Mission Houston and a chemical engineer by profession. He
described the deity as “Vishnu,” meaning something that pervades all.
“He is residing in every heart,” Nanavaty said, urging
participants to look inside themselves to find God. “God is as far away
from each one of us as the ocean is from the wave,” he said. “There
is no distance.”
Mahmoud El-Gamal represented Islam and identified God as “Allah”
as revealed in the Koran and other teachings of the prophet Mohammed. “Because
God transcends time and space, we cannot ponder his essence,” explained
El-Gamal, professor of economics and statistics at Rice University in Houston.
“But we can ponder his nature.”
In written notes given to participants, El-Gamal explained
Muslims believe God may be known through “introspection and reflection
upon the world, as well as through revelation received by especially gifted
men, commonly called prophets or messengers.”
On the second question, about the source of evil and suffering,
the panelists took a more diverse path.
“God creates both good and evil,” Federov said. “To
have it any other way is to have two gods.”
The rabbi placed responsibility for choosing between good and
evil squarely on humans themselves but rejected the notion of original sin,
the Christian teaching that Adam and Eve brought the punishment of death into
the world.
He acknowledged the existence of Satan but not as an opposite
of God. He compared Satan to a district attorney who works for God, the judge.
From the Christian perspective, evil exists because humanity
has been given free will by God and chooses to sin, Brooks said.
He identified Satan as the tempter and source of evil and suffering.
However, God “is working all things together for good.”
Brooks explained. And despite humanitys sin, “God chose to love us
while we were at our worst,” he added.
From the Buddhist perspective, happiness or suffering is a
choice, Hong said. “You can create happiness. You can create suffering.
The condition is how you look at it.”
In Hindu belief, evil and suffering are the result of a persons
own actions, Nanavaty said. “We have the freedom to change our lives….
(Thus) we are not punished for our sins; we are punished by our sins,”
he said. “All the suffering is because of ignorance.”
Islam teaches that all of life on Earth is a temporary test,
El-Gamal said. There are tests both of affluence and suffering, he added. El-Gamal
also suggested that all suffering ultimately comes from God, but it tends to
manifest through the actions of humans.
On the third question, about ultimate destiny, three of the
panelists expressed belief in some kind of afterlife.
Meanwhile, the Buddhist representative spoke of reincarnation,
and the Hindu spokesperson identified no afterlife.
“On an individual level, it is the destiny of the human
being to die,” Federov noted of Jewish beliefs. “Judaism believes
this world is not the end. There is punishment of the soul in the next life
for the sins we commit in this life, and then, the soul goes back to God.”
This is true for all souls, “except those that are inherently
evil,” the rabbi explained.
In the Christian perspective, “Christ will return to judge
humankind and the world on the basis of whether we have accepted his mediation
for sin,” Brooks said.
This is a free gift of salvation made possible by God through
the life, death and resurrection of Jesus Christ, the pastor said. “All
of us may accept his gift.”
Buddhists believe in reincarnation, Hong said, meaning the
way a person lives as a human impacts what they will become in the next life.
“You plant good seeds, you have a beautiful tree,” he explained.
The ultimate destiny for Hindus is to be happy, to know identity
with the creator, Nanavaty said. “Happiness is within me.
Bliss
is every individuals destiny.”
Muslims see the next life as the main life, El-Gamal said.
The current life is “transient” and “irrelevant,” merely
a test to determine how the next life will be lived, he said.
Gods judgment regarding the afterlife will be based on
how a person has lived, El-Gamal said.
At one point, Brooks and El-Gamal were asked whether Christians
and Muslims worship the same God.
El-Gamal said the Koran presupposes the Christian teaching
on the Trinity as a belief that has “gone astray.” While Islam acknowledges
Jesus as one of many messengers of God, it does not accept the statement of
Jesus that he is himself God, El-Gamal said.
However, so long as Christians and Muslims focus on the teaching
of God to do good and forbid evil, “We can live just fine, and as far as
were concerned, its the same God,” El-Gamal responded.
Brooks noted that Christianity “clearly teaches that God
is three in one” but still is a monotheistic religion.
The one God reveals himself in three forms, Brooks said, drawing
a comparison to water, which remains water in the form of a liquid, solid or
gas.
“It is critical to Christianity that Jesus was not just
a prophet but God in the flesh,” Brooks explained.
Another person asked Federow why Jews do not believe Jesus
was the promised Messiah.
The rabbi said Christians and Jews define the term “messiah”
differently. Jesus does not meet the true Jewish criteria for what the messiah
is prophesied to be, he said. “None of the things the messiah is to do
have happened.”
Further, Christians should not project their non-Jewish understanding on Jewish
expectations for the messiah, Federow insisted. “Its our word. We
define it.” (ABP)