All Religions Are True

All Religions Are True is the tentative conclusion Mike reaches after searching for a way to understand human religious belief. Rather than selecting one creed and condemning the rest as false, he wonders whether every religion may express truth from a different direction. The proposition grows from a concrete problem: scientific description and philosophical argument do not give him what he seeks, while religious traditions offer meaningful fragments without an agreed pattern. His shift is both intellectual and personal, grounded in his encounter with human mortality and in the claim that the human being is God.

The Search for a Pattern

Mike’s inquiry is wide-ranging and deliberate. In one burst of reading, he gathers the Talmud, several versions of the Bible, the Book of the Dead, the Book of Mormon, the New Revelation, assorted Apocrypha, the Koran, the Golden Bough, The Way, Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures, sacred writings from other religions, and Crowley’s Book of the Law. The diversity of the pile makes the obstacle visible: he has collected traditions in abundance, but accumulation has not made their meaning cohere. Surrounded by the books, he admits to Jill that he does not understand.

The gap between information and understanding is central to the question. Mike had earlier recited a long list of books he had read, including reference volumes, Romeo and Juliet, Casanova’s memoirs, and a manual of cross-examination; after reading, he says, he tried to grok what he had taken in. His later religious investigation follows the same distinction. Possessing texts, or absorbing their contents, does not itself produce the pattern he wants. Even in Palo Alto, he tries and fails to consume the whole Hoover Library in enormous gulps, recognizing that he takes in raw data faster than he can grok it. The book-filled room in San Francisco marks a change from indiscriminate intake to a focused search, but not yet a solution.

Mike rules out neither science nor philosophy as worthless. He says that the Old Ones taught him more about the physical structure of the universe than human scientists can yet manage, but that the scientists’ aims are not his own. Their work is appropriate to its purpose; it simply cannot deliver the understanding he is pursuing. He compares the mismatch to trying to grok a desert by counting its grains of sand: exhaustive measurement need not yield comprehension of the whole.

Philosophy also fails him, though for a different reason. As Mike sees it, philosophers tend to emerge with what they brought in, while some establish their assumptions by reasoning in circles. His mention of Kant illustrates his impatience with a system that appears to certify its starting points rather than discover what lies beyond them. Religion seems the remaining place to look, yet its texts offer him only pieces that seem true, never a shared pattern. Again and again, he finds that the decisive step is assigned to faith, precisely the kind of unexamined acceptance he is trying to get beyond.

Death, Laughter, and the Human Need for Religion

The opening for a new interpretation comes through Mike’s discovery of laughter among humans. He distinguishes the Martian world he knew from Earth: on Mars, he says, events that humans find funny either cannot happen, are prevented by the Old Ones’ planning, or lack the wrongness that makes them funny to people on Earth. Death provides his sharpest contrast. Jill insists that death is not funny; Mike answers by asking why humans tell so many jokes about it.

His answer changes the question from which doctrine is correct to what religions do for people. Human beings know they are dying, and death is grievous; Mike sees laughter as one means by which they find the courage to face it. He observes that religions contradict one another on many points, yet each is filled with ways to help people endure the knowledge of death. Religious difference therefore does not automatically disprove religious truth. The traditions may be distinct responses to a common human condition, and their practical capacity to sustain courage becomes evidence Mike had not previously known how to read.

This reasoning revises the terms of his earlier search. He had treated inconsistency as a reason to expect that at most one religion could be true: if one were right, the others must be wrong. His insight does not show that the doctrines are identical, nor does it settle their competing claims. Instead, he challenges the assumption that truth must be exclusive in just that way. A religion may perform real work for human beings even when it differs from another religion’s account of the world.

Direction, Selfhood, and the Unfinished Conclusion

Mike makes the shift vivid through a spatial analogy. Asked to consider the shortest direction around the universe, he replies that whichever way one points is the shortest, and that the pointer ends by pointing back at itself. The image turns Jill’s logical objection against the expectation of a single outward route to truth. If the search’s point of departure is the human self, then different directions need not be reduced to one exclusive path; they may return to a shared point.

That shared point is the principle Jill says Mike himself taught her: “Thou art God.” Mike affirms it, then suggests that this one prime fact, which he regards as independent of faith, may mean that all faiths are true. The claim is carefully tentative. He says they may be true; he does not demonstrate a common theology, reconcile their contradictions, or identify one scheme that explains every sacred text. His conclusion is a possibility opened by a change in perspective, not a completed system.

Jill tests the idea in the moment by saying that, if all religions are true, she wants to worship Siva. Mike calls her a little pagan and remarks that people in San Francisco would drive her out. Their exchange keeps the principle from becoming a bloodless abstraction: acceptance of multiple religious truths meets the social boundaries that mark a practice as acceptable or strange. The scene ends with the question still open, but its direction has changed. Mike is no longer asking only which religion survives the others’ contradictions; he is asking whether those differences can coexist with a truth rooted in humanity’s shared struggle to meet death, and in the recognition of divinity within the self.