I have to apologize in advance for this blog. I keep running into Universalists. People who believe everyone on the planet is the same. People who believe that all religions worship the same God. They say: 'Each religion is just a separate path to the top of the same mountain'.
Nothing could be less logical to me.
First of all, the bulk of all religious beliefs in the world have nothing to do with a God. Most African religions, indigenous people and Shinto worship focus on some natural phenomena: rocks, trees, mountains etc. The major indigenous religion of India, a giant country, is focused on Hindu stories and many Gods. The religion founded in India, Buddhism focuses its teachings about suffering and meditation. China, the other giant country, has Taoism mixed in with local tribal worship patterns. Taoism is not focused on a God.
Then there are the four major global religions. The Jewish God is an entity that has created a nation, with a contract written into the Ten Commandments, and considers that nation its most identifiable quality. Islam worships a deceased human prophet and mentions a mono-deity as an afterthought. Christian Catholicism claims to worship a deity that virtually no other group in the world considers to be a single God. The major Catholic offshoot, Christian-Protestantism, has over 5,000 American denominations forming a pantheon of supreme deities ranging from Quakers who's God speaks to silent people, to Universal Unitarians, to Orthodox Lutherans who have a vengeful God punishing the dead, to giant evangelical churches who’s god promises wealth and prosperity. It is hard to find a single God in this pantheon of worshippers.
Enough from me on this. I consider myself to be an ignorant religious peasant. I know there is an explanation for everything I've mentioned. The explanations can only be treated as having a common core if one compresses them into the statement that ‘all humans acknowledge a world of unknowns’. Which seems to be a truism.