I first began my spiritual journey when I was seven years old, after I picked up a book about Ancient Egyptian Mythology. This led me down a turbulent rabbit hole of “Percy Jackson” books, New Age Alien conspiracy theory YouTube and eventually Mahayana Buddhism. My parents raised me agnostic, meaning we did not practice any specific religion, but had some influences from our Christian and Jewish heritages. During my first year of high school, I was exposed to Buddhism, and I have been enchanted ever since. Now, I am a Religion major and love learning about many faiths and traditions, especially from so-called “mystical” and esoteric teachings.
Recently, I have seen a rising amount of theological discourse online between mostly Christians and Muslims, but also some Hindus, Buddhists, Neo-Pagans and Atheists, in the form of edits—short videos that flashily romanticize a given subject—and TikTok live stream debates that lack any intellectual or spiritual humility. The vast majority of these arguments follow a logic of “my deity or religion is better than yours because it says so in my sacred text” or “my medieval and colonial warfare was successful, so clearly my theology is the correct one.” I am not here to debunk these types of arguments—that would not be very hard, anyway—but to show why the questions that lead to these stupid debates do not need to be asked in general. I also do not wish to tell anyone how to practice or believe their religion, or lack thereof, because I am less interested in converting people and more interested in talking about how we can think in better ways about our spiritualities and theologies. The central issue with these pointless debates is how we keep assuming that only one path is the objective truth, but with our subjective perspectives and pluralistic world, that cannot be the case.
To give some examples of these babblings on TikTok, I will briefly describe some debates and posts I saw around Easter. One Christian user posted a clip from a live stream with the AI-generated prompt behind her saying, “Prove Islam’s Claims are True.” She asked the following question: “Apart from Islam, who makes the claim that somebody else was out on a cross?” This was in reference to Sura 4 of the Quran, where it is stated that Jesus was not crucified, contradicting the New Testament. Another post from an atheist account explains how the Quran is wrong because it has “scientific inaccuracies” relating to male reproductive anatomy. Later, I found a Muslim-hosted live stream that had “Even If Muhammad Was Lying…He’s Still Right” as a prompt in the background for discussion. A Christian guest said that the book of Isaiah from the Hebrew Tanakh—or the Christian Old Testament—prophesied the life of Jesus and is divine because the New Testament said so, and the host’s response amounted to an overcomplicated “nuh uh.”
Other posts I found deal with anime being demonic, Hindus and Buddhists arguing in a comment section about diets, and live stream prompts begging for debates and any religious group to “prove me wrong.” Who cares? Clearly, there is a digital audience for this type of content, but how much of it is doing the job of converting others to your faiths and causes? These posts focus on minute and specific details that do not represent or undermine these religions’ central messages and commandments.
Around two and a half millennia ago, a guy in the woods of northern India claimed to have a holistic and transcendental understanding of reality and our place in it. This guy was the Conqueror, the Enlightened one, Teacher of Gods and Humans: Siddartha Gautama, the Buddha. But why was he any special? An unknown number of people from around his time had also claimed similar understandings—Zoroaster, Mahavira, Laozi, Pythagoras, Pharaohs and shamans—and many others after him as well, dare I list them all. The Buddha, however, allegedly taught and explained 84,000—a number symbolizing an immensely large quantity, similar to the modern term, “a gazillion”—paths to enlightenment. One interpretation of this group of teachings, shared in the Buddha Weekly website, is that there are so many paths to the ultimate truth that to consider just one path as the only path would be an ignorant stance.
I know that some people hold on dearly to interpretations of their texts that say there is only one god or one path, and that they need to convert disbelievers to that true path. This theology is fine if it works for you. Trust me, I understand the feeling that everyone is wrong about something and that we are headed to a dark place because of it—I live in 2025 America too. But trying to convert people in these annoying and unproductive manners, without actually emphasizing any meaningful teachings, is not going to accomplish anything. We can focus on the domination parts of dogma, or we can look towards the more beautiful part of theology, self-realization.
In many forms of mysticism, everyone—and maybe even everything—is a manifestation of divine essence. In Buddhism, this doctrine is called Buddha-nature: the original state of enlightened and perfected being that we all have inside, unbeknownst to our defiled conscious minds. Many Christians believe the Kingdom of God is within us, many Hindus believe all beings are part of Brahman and so on, with so many similarities among cultures and time periods. This theological stance is often referred to as panentheism or monism: systems of understanding that each being has a divine spark and that there is no literal separation between the worldly and the sacred beyond our unaware perceptions. To take this line of thought further, it makes the most sense that each being has their own approach to accessing that divinity; some pray, some meditate, some produce art or solve equations. Because the scope of divinity is limitless in definition, how one communes with it is limitless as well. With this understanding, I have been able to view everyone, including myself, more compassionately, and I have been able to find some peace in our chaotic and violent world. There is no need for worrying and fighting over minute differences in what each sacred text says and commands, because there is enough room in this universe for many beliefs and practices to coexist.