In Christianity: Opium or Truth?
Lennox challenges the notion that the main aim of all religions is to make people to behave well towards one another. He resorts to analogy of pirate ships: while pirates had their own moral code according to which the booty they captured was distributed fairly among them and thus, they ensured that they behaved well towards one another, they overlooked the fundamental fact that they were outlaws in the eyes of lawful government and that their code would not save them, once the government catches them. He continued by pointing out that to assume that the main aim of all religions to make people to behave well towards one another means to overlook such a fundamental question as whether there is a supreme being, a Creator, to whom people owe allegiance and before whom people they will answer for their disloyalty and neglect. According to Lennox, if one accepts that there is a Creator and he owes allegiance to him, then he will necessarily reject the concepts of other religions. For instance, a Christian will reject the notion of Theravada Buddhism that the greatest spiritual presence in the world is a man in his eternal presence because for a Christian no man is God. Lennox further draws attention to what he calls as “irreconcilable difference” between Hinduism and Buddhism on the one hand, and Judaism and Christianity on the other. He points out that according to Hinduism and Buddhism, the material world is an illusion and that the true goal of a wise man is to run away from the material world into an immaterial nirvana. Christianity and Judaism maintain that the material world is good since it was made by the Creator and that human bodies are also good, although spoiled by sin. These different worldviews show that the religions do not aim at the same goals.
As far as the problem of human guilt is concerned, Lennox points out that neither Buddhism, nor later versions of Hinduism and Judaism offer instruments of salvation and forgiveness for sins. In this respect Christianity is unique, since it presents Christ, a son of the God, who was sent to deal with the problem of sin by his sacrifice. In Christianity, the sacrifice made by Christ means that people can receive forgiveness for their sins. It is important to understand this difference because once again this difference shows that various religions offer fundamentally different worldviews, despite the fact that they may have something in common such as commandments not to murder and so on. Lennox notes that in Christianity salvation does not depend on works and merit, but that it is a free gift of God. To explain the nature of salvation, he resorts to analogy of marriage. He asks the rhetoric question of whether it would be acceptable for a husband to leave his wife shortly after the marriage for so long as possible before allowing her to know that he has …
