In the name of Allah, the Merciful to all, the Compassionate

Last Monday, the Bishop of Rome addressed Catholic followers regarding the dire importance of exhibiting religious tolerance. During his hour-long speech, Pope Francis was quoted telling the Vatican’s guests that the Quran, and the spiritual teachings contained therein, are just as valid as the Holy Bible.

To the uninitiated, the Pope’s speech may seem as an attempt to find more common ground with the Muslim world and to woo Muslims into the fold, but in fact, that’s not what he said. Pope Francis went on to state that:

“Jesus Christ, Mohammed, Jehovah, Allah. These are all names employed to describe an entity that is distinctly the same across the world. For centuries, blood has been needlessly shed because of the desire to segregate our faiths. This, however, should be the very concept which unites us as people, as nations, and as a world bound by faith. Together, we can bring about an unprecedented age of peace, all we need to achieve such a state is respect each other’s beliefs, for we are all children of God regardless of the name we choose to address him by. We can accomplish miraculous things in the world by merging our faiths, and the time for such a movement is now. No longer shall we slaughter our neighbors over differences in reference to their God.”

It’s not in Muslims and Christians’ interests to deepen cultural and theological rifts, and any attempt to reduce tensions should be welcomed by all of us. If Pope Francis wants us all to set aside our differences and focus only on the similarities, that’s OK. But Pope’s prescription was to annihilate Islam and Christianity alike, by forcing them to accept religious pluralism-which finally leads to a form of pantheism.

The essence of monotheism is to believe that truth is not a product of our imagination – and that it is for real. You may call that infinite being Allah, Yahweh, God, or anything else you want; as long as you understand that the name you use is just your own reference to that infinite being, neither a franchise nor a trademark.

As humans, we are not perfect, and obviously our understanding of an infinite being commensurate with our capacity. As long as we accept that our understanding of that infinite being is the product of our own mind, we are still in the realm of monotheism. So any difference in beliefs should be considered as a difference in understanding of the same infinite being, and as soon as we reach a higher understanding, we have to abide to it.

A difference in understanding of the same infinite being does not mean that all understandings are equally valid. On the contrary, our understanding is like a model in physics. Whenever another model explains a phenomenon better, we have no reason to stick to the old and refuted model.

The essence of pluralism is the belief that all understandings are equally true. To draw a comparison, it’s like believing that all contradicting physics theories are equally valid - a belief which, inevitably, destroys logic. By believing this, you have no choice but to admit that there is no real world outside of our own imagination.

Few, if any, can truly accept pluralism; because we know that there is a real world out there, and that our understanding of the world is just a model that helps us to interact with it better. None of us really believe in pluralism in the real world, then how – and why should people accept it in the case of religion?

This is highly suspicious and it seems Pope Francis is trying to blend all religions into one-world religion of pantheism instead of an attempt at peace. What Pope Francis is doing aligns with what other elites are attempting to do economically, socially, and politically to establish a one-world government.