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A religion proposes a diagnosis of, and a cure for, what it takes to be the deep and devastating disease that we all share. Religious traditions differ as their diagnoses and cures differ. Thus different accounts of what there is — an omnicompetent God and self-conscious substances made in God's image; qualityless Brahman and nothing else; or co-dependent momentary states — correlate with accounts of what needs to be made right — separation due to sin removed by God's forgiveness in response to repentance and trust; ignorance of one's identity with Brahman cured by knowledge gained in one sort of esoteric experience; knowledge of one's transitory nature gained in a different sort of esoteric experience. The metaphysics of some religious traditions — and while it is sometimes denied, occasionally even by the traditions, that they have any metaphysic, the denial itself is cast in a context of metaphysical claims — differ vastly from the metaphysics of others.

DOI: 10.1007/978-1-4020-1986-9_19

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