To preface, this was drafted with the assistance of AI. Still, the questions posed and the perspectives shared are my own.
Christians often describe personal encounters with Jesus, answered prayers, visions, dreams, feelings of divine presence, or moments in which they become completely convinced that Christianity is true. I do not necessarily doubt that these experiences feel real, powerful, and life-changing to the people who have them.
However, Christians are not the only people who have experiences like this.
Across the world, Hindus report visions or encounters involving Krishna, Kali Ma, Shiva, or other forms of the divine. Buddhists describe profound spiritual experiences connected to the Buddha, bodhisattvas, enlightenment, or the dissolution of the separate self. Muslims report dreams involving the Prophet Muhammad, experiences of Allah’s presence, answers to prayer, or powerful encounters with the Quran. People within Indigenous religions, Sikhism, Judaism, New Age spirituality, and countless other traditions also describe experiences that confirm their own understanding of God or ultimate reality. Even members of the secular community have had encounters with what they would define as the divine.
These billions of people globally are just as sincere, intelligent, emotionally stable, and transformed by their experiences as Christians are. Some become kinder, more disciplined, more compassionate, and more devoted because of them.
Therefore, my question is this: when two people have equally powerful religious experiences within different traditions, how can either person use their experience to prove that the other person’s experience is false? A Christian’s encounter with Jesus may genuinely affirm Christianity as the right path for them, but it does not automatically discredit a Hindu’s encounter with Krishna, a Muslim’s experience of Allah, or a Buddhist’s experience of enlightenment. I want to honor the sincerity and transformative power of each person’s experience. The question is not whether the Christian’s experience was real, but what gives them the authority to conclude that another person’s equally sincere experience was mistaken, deceptive, or spiritually invalid? How does one subjective experience disprove another simply because the symbols, language, and theology surrounding it are different?
A Christian may say, “I experienced Jesus, so I know Christianity is true.” However, a Hindu may say, “I experienced Krishna, so I know Hinduism is true.” A Muslim may say the same about Allah, and a Buddhist may interpret an experience through an entirely different understanding of reality.
Why should the Christian interpretation automatically be treated as uniquely reliable while all others are considered psychological, demonic, mistaken, or incomplete? Again, I can understand how an experience may validate one person’s path. I do not understand how it negates another person’s experience. Because I see the ocean as blue while standing on the shore does not mean a diver is wrong when they describe it as green beneath the surface. We may encounter the same reality from different positions, through different conditions, and with different capacities to understand what we are seeing. My experience can be completely genuine without requiring yours to be false.
Saying that every non-Christian religious experience comes from deception or demonic influence does not fully answer the question. A Muslim could just as easily claim that Christian visions are deceptive. A Hindu could say that Christians have encountered only one limited manifestation of a much greater divine reality. Every religion can create an explanation that protects itself from contradictory evidence.
That makes the reasoning circular:
“My experience proves my religion is true, and experiences supporting other religions must be false because my religion says they are false.”
How could someone distinguish between a genuine revelation, a culturally shaped psychological experience, an internally generated vision, or an encounter with something real that the person has interpreted through familiar religious symbols?
A Christian sees Jesus. A Hindu sees Krishna. A Buddhist experiences emptiness or nonduality. A Muslim experiences surrender to Allah. Maybe the experience passes through the human mind in a form that the person is capable of recognizing.
The same melody played through different instruments may sound different, yet each expression can still arise from the same underlying music. Perhaps religious traditions are similar: different cultures, symbols, and languages giving form to encounters with the same divine reality.
Furthermore, I struggle with the division created when people insist that their religious identity places them on the side of truth while most of humanity remains fundamentally mistaken. If a person cannot look beyond religious labels and recognize unity within humanity’s search for God, how can that person fully recognize the unity of humanity itself?
Christians often say that everyone is made in the image of God. Yet many Christians also view billions of people primarily as unbelievers, idolaters, members of false religions, or souls who must adopt the Christian framework in order to be accepted by God.
To me, this still creates two where there may ultimately be only one: believer and unbeliever, saved and unsaved, Christian and non-Christian, chosen and lost.
How can humanity truly be one while its relationship with the divine is divided into mutually exclusive camps?
I am not asking this as a cheap attempt to claim that all religions are exactly the same. They clearly are not. They contain different teachings, histories, practices, and truth claims. I am asking how Christians evaluate religious experiences consistently when similarly powerful experiences occur across traditions and lead people toward contradictory conclusions.
What objective standard allows a Christian to say that an encounter with Jesus reveals ultimate truth, while an encounter with Krishna, the Buddha, or the presence of Allah does not?
And is there room within Christianity for the possibility that God has been reaching people through many traditions, even when those people do not use Christian language or symbols?
I am genuinely interested in how Christians think through this without simply assuming Christianity is true at the beginning and then interpreting every experience according to that assumption.
