The Problem of Religious Diversity and God's Hiddenness

 

Salience which I have written a note on recently:

salience

has a very interesting etymology.

salient

In other words, what is it that leaps out at you, that impresses by its, to you, obvious prominence.  If you are of a logico-empirical cast of mind then the difficulties presented by those associated problems of the diversity of religions and God's hiddenness will be salient.  This is where the light is and here is the locus of your search though what you seek is in the dark elsewhere.

What do the Marshs miss, what are they not seeing:

diversity paper

Specsavers:

not seeing

They are like the Mulla Nusruddin who was searching under the street lamp for his keys even though he had lost them in the house.  His house was not electrified at the time.

There are several luminaries who are not in the least baffled by diversity, of any kind.  God isn’t hidden, merely that the logico-empirical method can’t find Him.  Shankaracarya does not hesitate in his declaration that the Vedas are part of the superimposition on the Absolute and not the truth.  They are an interim position or a metaphorical projection of the Unknowable, Unnameable. The great modern sage Sri Swami Sadchidanandendra writes:

Thus the means of knowledge called the Veda is ultimateley seen to be an illusion.  And its power to effect release through destroying Ignorance is also an illusion.  And on this basis one might wonder whether direct knowledge of the supreme Self was itself also an illusion, or whether it was real.  If it were an illusion, then the liberation it effected would also be  illusory, and in that case what would be the point in the upanishadic discipline?  If, on the other hand, we say that direct knowledge of the Self is real, then how could real direct knowledge arise from illusory upanishadic texts?

Further down Sri S.S.S. answers this doubt:

Know that the supreme reality is self-evident and self-established.  For superimposed fancies could not sustain themselves for an instant without the supreme reality as their substratum.

So by extension all scriptures are of their nature ways of focusing the mind.  Each has its own internal coherence but the final truth is apophatic and lies under ‘the cloud of unknowing’.