Prudence Primrose

随筆Essays

How Can Many Religions Be True?

25 October 2025 · 3 min read

Okay I'll bite... "Many religions are true" is just asking someone if they believe in, essentially, the most vague gesturing towards 'Perennialism'1 and I mean specifically the oldest more orthodox definition of this word. This is -MOST PEOPLE- in 2025.

The thing you must understand is that there are two kinds of religious people, there are religious who believe that they must believe in and have faith in the correct things, and that this is a gatekeeping measure to the afterlife. These people are, frankly, and I will not mince words here, insane. These are the people who commit war crimes in the name of their faith, the fundamentalists, the literalists2, the people who truly do not have a religious or spiritual bone in their body and if they did they would immediately develop anti-social solipsistic quasi-gnostic schizophrenia.

The other kind of religious person is not this kind of paltry domestic creature of the first kind, this person understands that religions are manmade3 but also correctly understand that they directionally point to something 'True'. They typically understand that 'Truth' cannot be known, but that the quest for pointing the compass as best towards it, despite the pointer's constant and unending wobble, is genuinely worth it, and might even be something fundamental to the human spirit. Some people take it in a materialistic way and say that we are biological animals who evolved to think like this, so in a self-improvement style way, the only way to be a full human is to embrace the razor's edge of religiosity and in doing so happymaxx to their full potential. Either way they are essentially the same thing.

This latter group was not always the majority of religious people, it is a sorta carnivore vs herbivore population boom and growth dynamic. The first Protestants, if you read their writings, especially from the lower common people, are much like the latter person. Yet as time goes on, there is a regression towards the former, you see this in the most fundamentalist insane American Protestants today.

Yet in truth, no group is ever 100%. This is why you always have seekers and people who, and now I will insert my own beliefs, -rightfully- understand in the truth of Perennialism. This is a progressive and evolutionary mechanism and one that has been churning on since the Renaissance led to the Protestant reformation which lead to the Great Awakening which led to the New Age which has thus led us to now. This philosophical tract is all about Perennialism, and as the West becomes more and more secular we might expect a rise of atheism, and some statistics do mistakenly show that due to bad epistemics, but what we really see is nearly half of American's believing that you can talk to the dead4, a trend consistent among stated religious beliefs, even atheists. The same is said for beliefs such as reincarnation, astrology, and divination5 like tarots or 'synchronicities', and the transformative supernatural power of prayer or 'manifestation'. (If this interests you read the book 'The Secular Paradox'6).

So to the question, 'How does it work'? Well it works because most people in 2025, even if officially they belong to an organized belief system, have adopted New Age (I call this Aquarian7 as 'New Age' has a negative stereotype and often only is used in the pejorative) beliefs into their mainstay. One of these is the idea of Perennialism.

This is why I often jokingly say things like "American Buddhism is a form of Calvnism8", on its face with a vanilla hermeneutic it seems absurd, but when we look at things both genealogically and ontologically, as in; "If we completely ignore the coat of paint of aesthetics what does the actual engine of function look like?" then it starts to actually make sense both ontologically, because many operating assumptions of American Buddhism are the exact same as Calvnism or simply radical reinterpretations of Calvinist doctrine, rather than authentic and genuine importations of Buddhist ontology. (If this line of thinking interests you, be happy, I am working on an essay that begins with the provocative sentence "Western Buddhism is a form of Calvinist Protestantism and that's a good thing").

If you and I touch the same thing and I feel red and you feel blue, we touched the same thing ontologically, but our epistemology which is downstream of our lived experience differed. Like river systems diverging from a single source.

It works because most people correctly understand the ancient Indian parable of 'the blindmen and the elephant9' (see image 2) sufficed as the ancient hymn goes, "Truth is One, but the wise10 speak of it in various ways".

Notes

By the editor.

  1. Perennial philosophy (philosophia perennis) holds that the world's religions share a common truth. The term goes back to Agostino Steuco's 1540 work De perenni philosophia, and was popularised by Aldous Huxley's The Perennial Philosophy (1945). Steuco's version was Christian and Renaissance, which is the "oldest more orthodox" sense she says she means. source ↩
  2. Fundamentalism is itself an American Protestant invention: The Fundamentals were twelve volumes published 1910–1915 to defend inerrancy, the virgin birth and a literal return of Christ, and the Baptist editor Curtis Lee Laws is credited with coining "fundamentalist" in 1920. It names a modern movement, not the old faith. source ↩
  3. Xenophanes of Colophon (c. 500 BCE) is the earliest Greek to say it outright. In fragments preserved by Clement of Alexandria he says Ethiopians make their gods snub-nosed and black, Thracians blue-eyed and red-haired, and that horses and oxen, if they could draw, would draw gods like themselves. His conclusion was not atheism but a single greater god unlike mortals, which is her view too: man-made forms, pointing at something true. source ↩
  4. Pew's 2023 spirituality survey found 83% of US adults believe people have a soul or spirit, 57% believe in reunion with loved ones in the afterlife, and 42% that the dead can communicate with the living. A separate 2023 Pew study found 53% say they have been visited by a dead family member in a dream or some other form. source ↩
  5. Pew's 2018 survey found about six in ten American adults hold at least one of four New Age beliefs: reincarnation (33%), astrology (29%), psychics (40%) and spiritual energy in physical objects (40%). Religiously unaffiliated adults were about as likely as Christians to hold one, which fits her claim that these beliefs have spread across the borders of organised religion. source ↩
  6. Joseph Blankholm's The Secular Paradox: On the Religiosity of the Not Religious (NYU Press, 2022) is an ethnographic study of organised nonbelievers in the United States. It matches her broader point that irreligion in America keeps the habits and structures of religion. source ↩
  7. "New Age" takes its name from the astrological Age of Aquarius. Marilyn Ferguson's The Aquarian Conspiracy (1980) is the book that spread the term "Aquarian" for the movement. She prefers it because "New Age" is mostly heard as an insult. source ↩
  8. Scholars of "Protestant Buddhism" (Gananath Obeyesekere and Richard Gombrich, on Sri Lanka) described a modern Buddhism shaped by Protestant models: texts over ritual, laity over monks, personal practice over institution. David McMahan's The Making of Buddhist Modernism (2008) traces the same pattern in the West. Her own treatment is Buddhism in the United States. source ↩
  9. In the Pali Udāna (6.4) the Buddha tells it as a story about sectarian disputes: blind men feel one part each and quarrel over what the elephant is. It also appears in Jain and Hindu retellings, but the Buddhist form is the oldest we have. In What the Ghosts Actually Are the same image explains how the Ghosts are discovered, never invented. source ↩
  10. A rendering of Rigveda 1.164.46, ekam sat vipra bahudha vadanti. Its precise meaning is debated, and it is often shortened to "Truth is one, paths are many." Her essay True Polytheism Has Never Been Tried argues that most polytheisms have one first cause behind their gods, which is this verse's idea. source ↩