An ad in the free newspaper I picked up yesterday morning as I entered the PATH station on my way to New York caught my attention. There was an Anime-looking image with "The Golden Laws" in large print near the bottom and "Free Movie" in smaller print near the top. A brief explanation explained that this was all about "Happy Science," which was described as a religion. Naturally, I looked it up online when I got home that evening. What I discovered was that this is a new religion, started in the mid-1980s, and that it was born in Japan. It is essentially a variant of Buddhism and it claims to be open to people of all faiths. I wonder if that really means people are expected to be able to retain their other faith together with "Happy Science."
The claim to being a unifying faith is far from unique to "Happy Science." The Bahá’í Faith, for example, makes a great deal of being a bringing together of the major world faiths. It was born out of monotheism in general, and Islam in particular.
These faiths claim to be unifiers, but they are clearly distinct from all other faiths. Within Christianity there are many movements, denominations and traditions, and some of them claim to be "unity-minded." The Stone-Campbell Movement, of which I consider myself part, is one of these. It exists as a distinct movement within Christianity while attempting to speak for unity, though as a movement it is itself deeply fractured.
There is something odd about the inclusivity/exclusivity mix going on in all this, the narrow and the broad together in such an odd and apparently contradictory way. There it is, though.
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