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A main premise of the New Age religious "movement" emphasizes a Theosophical approach, where we throw all the religions into a mixing pot, extract the things we like, and reject the rest, or change it to suit our palette. Here's what happens when we take a spoonful of this religious stew and interpret it without the proper reverence.

We dip our ladle into our steamy broth and fill a bowl with a saying from Jesus, "I am in the Father, the Father is in me." We dip again and pull out a saying from Krishna, "I am in everything." Another dip provides us with an insight from the Buddha, "Everyone has a Buddha Nature." We mix these together in one bowl, and conclude that Jesus being in the Father and the Father being in him, means that, I, myself, am in the Father, and the Father is in me. Mix and match this with what Krishna said, and it reinforces this notion because Krishna is in everything, meaning I am Krishna. The Buddha says everybody has a Buddha nature; therefore, I am the Buddha. They've all matched up. Now we can climb a plateau with Shirley McLaine and shout with her to the hills, "I am God!"

The problem is that all three of these religious figures made other important points in regard to their statements. Jesus said that we will be one with him, and through him we will be one with the Father. Krishna said he is in everything, but everything is not in him. The Buddha said that to achieve our Buddha Nature we must overcome all of our false views, particularly the ones where we think we are something special (such as thinking that we are God).

We end up with a religious concoction clinging to what is palatable and trashing whatever requires discipline. Hindus believe in reincarnation, so everybody gets more than one chance, and we like that, but let's reject their notions of karma and dharma because those require us to take responsibility. Instead we'll adopt an every-man-for-himself philosophy of the Buddha's teachings, but since the Buddha admonishes his disciples to avoid alcohol, we'll adopt some Catholic Christian premises because you've got to love a religion that gets together and drinks wine every Sunday morning. However, what we hate about Christianity is its concepts of heaven and hell, so we'll stick with the Hindu-Buddhist reincarnation idea and ignore the fact that they, too, have heaven and hell, and that their hell goes twelve levels deep, no less. In the end we are seeking eternal life in the flesh, and we are making no real attempt to attain immortality.

The book The Hero with A Thousand Faces by Joseph Campbell is a wonderful exposition on world mythologies, and how similar icons appear in a variety of cultures. It's related, to some extent, to the works of psychologist Carl Jung and his "collective unconscious," the source of archetypal images shared by diverse cultures separated by geography, history and theology, yet intimately sharing certain mythological ideas. Campbell's book shows connections and relationships between Jesus, the Buddha, Krishna, and many other world religious figures.

This connection isn't lost on Christian theologians who are way out in front of the Christian masses in their thinking. One conclusion many liberal Protestant theologians have come to is that all religions are equally valid. Catholic theologians have come to similar conclusions. The Catholic theologian Hans Küng in his monumental book On Being A Christian (Double Day & Company, 1976) states:

The other religions were regarded formerly as lies, works of the devil‹at best--vestigial truth. Now they count as a kind of ("relative") revelation through which innumerable individuals of ancient times and of the present have experienced and now experience the mystery of God. Formerly they seemed to be ways of damnation. Now they are recognized as ways of salvation‹whether "extraordinary" or "ordinary" is a matter of dispute among scholars‹for innumerable persons, perhaps for the majority of mankind. They are therefore "legitimate" religions and represent in fact all the religion that is possible in a particular social situation, with forms of belief and worship, concepts and values, symbols and ordinances, religious and ethical experiences, which have a "relative validity," "a relative, providential right to exist.

Of course, being a Catholic theologian Küng goes on to explain that potential salvation outside the Catholic Church might occur in spite of the flaws of other religions. The inherent validity of various world religions is the obvious conclusion if world religions are studied open-mindedly and compared.

Now let me touch the brakes. Just because all religions may be equally valid does not mean that all teachings are good. The Buddhist monk Thich Nhat Hanh talks about "false" Buddhist Sanghas (groups). The music group the Beatles went to study under a bona fide Hindu Guru and were disappointed to find their Guru end up in a sex scandal. I spoke earlier about a group "hating for Jesus," and there is an array of similarly distorted and wacky armchair theology being practiced today. Plus, there is multitude of downright crazy cults in the world.

Regardless of splitting hairs about positive versus negative teachings, a fundamental strain from all the religions presents itself. In Gandhi's favorite story, the Hindu Bhagavad-Gita, Krishna mentions the word again and again, "discipline." The religion one labors under appears to be less important than the discipline associated with participating in that religion, the discipline required to find God.

In the book Theology for the 80's (The Westminster Press; 1980) by John Carmody, Raimundo Panikkar is quoted as saying [about visiting India] :

I "left" as a Christian, I "found" myself as a Hindu and I "return" a Buddhist, without having ceased to be a Christian.

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