Have you attended an inter-religious dialogue? I've often found myself in such events wherein some Smart Alec stands up and says, "We all must practise the golden rule - to treat others the way we want to be treated. We must not say our god is the only true god, and our religion is the only true religion".

Sounds all right, no?

But then, he goes on to say, "All are the same god. We just have different names for that one god, and we worship him in different ways". At this point, I see red flags waving all over my inter-religious dialogical sensibilities.

To insist that everyone's god is the same and that this god is just named differently and that we worship him differently is as ethnocentric and obstinate an insistence as that of the one who claims that his god is the only true god. Here are my two reasons why:

1. If all our gods were the same god, there wouldn't be a need for dialogue. Most pluralists I have met before seem to forget that part of an inter-religious dialogue is that of acknowledging that we are different, and that it is all right to be different in our convictions. Even if we wanted to rest purely on our commonalities, one main thing we have in common is that we have differences in our convictions! So for a dialogue partner to state his claim that all rivers flow into the same sea, and then to insist that everyone else has to embrace the same claim in order to bring about religious harmony, is as bad as someone who says he is Christian and thinks that everyone else should be Christian in exactly the same way that he is.

2. Not everyone in an inter-religious dialogue believes in a god! I know of at least one religion, in every inter-religious dialogue that I attend, which does not subscribe to the existence of an Almighty God. That religion speaks of itself as a way of life, a philosophy, a search to end human suffering by transcending beyond one's self, not of a god who brings salvation to his people. How dare anyone insist that everyone's god is the same to the exclusion of the religion that doesn't even subscribe to a godhead. What audacity to exercise such conceited ethnocentrism.

All rivers do not flow into the same sea. We are of different religions with different ways of articulating our understanding of the divine. And each religion, by its sheer nature, is exclusive in its claims to understanding the right path towards the divine. Whilst we each disagree with one another, that's okay; we can still honour one another's search for truth and purity. That's real dialogue.