The Dalai Lama is an entirely admirable defender of religious freedom and a moving advocate for the people of Tibet, whose past and present travails under communism are too often forgotten by westerners enamored of the dynamism of the Chinese economy.

Still, no one familiar with C.S. Lewis's masterful little book, The Abolition of Man, will imagine that the Dalai Lama has said something original by noting that the world's major religious traditions all teach similar moral messages. In the 1940s, Lewis went into some detail examining the parallels, which to him constitute a kind of fundamental human moral patrimony. Such commonalities also point toward a moral foundation for the assertion of "universal human rights," a point made by the sociologist of religion Peter Berger in 1977.

That the great world religion's share certain moral borders does not mean that they are simply variations-on-a-theme, however. Here is a suggestive quote from The Law of God: The Philosophical History of an Idea, by the eminent French scholar, Remi Brague:

"In the Bible and in Christianity...the presence of the divine does not comport an immediate demand for obedience. A space opens up in which God manifests Himself, thus offering Himself to a gaze that might risk something like a description. The divine shows itself, or rather givs itself, before asking anything of us and instead of asking. Not only is it true that 'God owes us nothing' (Leszek Kolakowski), but he does not ask anything of us. Although God does indeed expect something of hi creatures (that we develop according to our own logic), He does not, in fact, demand anything, or rather, He asks nothing more than His gift already asks, thanks to the simple fact that it is given: to be received. In the case of man, that reception does not require anything but humanity."

Other world religions conceive God, and our relationship to God, very differently. And those are the differences that can make a considerable difference.

Bertolt Brecht's "Galileo" and that deeply misleading staple of high school English courses, "Inherit the Wind," have thoroughly confused our understanding of the relationship between biblical faith and the emergence of modern science. To clear the cobwebs, ask yourself a question: Why did the scientific method, which assumes that the natural world is rationally knowable, arise in the West, and not elsewhere? Other cultures had made important advances in mathematics and technology, but it was the West that invented the scientific method. Why?

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