A Religious and Human Dilemma: To Exclude or to Embrace?

Religions are frequently "internally conflicted" as to whether they should either "exclude" or "embrace." Often they attempt to do both at the same time. On the one hand they may insist upon not only their own historical particularity and metaphysical uniqueness, but also their paradigmatic decisiveness and ultimate finality.

At the same time, religions often attempt to embrace and include, to make room for others spiritual perspectives and cultural traditions, whether by assimilating them within their own symbolic and metaphysical framework, by appealing to some common universal principles and truths, or by accepting the idea that the Infinite Reality some people call "God" or "Creator" or "Spirit" or "Essence" or "The Self" or "Emptiness" or "The Ground of Being" or "Being-in-Relationship" encompasses the profound mystery of "creative paradox" and pluralistic integration. Integral pluralists affirm that "God is an ocean with many shores." Dualists choose to exclude. Universalists choose to embrace. And still others live in a dialectical tension or paradoxical relationship between these two polarities.

The dialectical tension between the human impulse to "exclude" and to "embrace can produce considerable "intra-psychic" and "inter-personal" conflicts, as well as "intra-religious" and "inter-religious" ones.

How do you attempt to reconcile within yourself and within your religion, ideology or spirituality the divergent impulses to exclude and to embrace?