indifferentism

English

Etymology

From indifferent +‎ -ism.

Noun

indifferentism (usually uncountable, plural indifferentisms)

1. (religion) The doctrine that all religions are equally valid.
   • 1904, Guy Thorne, chapter 2, in When It Was Dark‎^[1], New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, page 7:

     The second class of parishioners were less Philistine, certainly, but even more hopeless from the parish priest’s point of view. In their luxurious houses they lived an easy, selfish, and sensual life, beyond his reach, surrounded by a wall of indifferentism, and contemptuous of all that was not tangible and material.

   • 1976, Geoffrey Parrinder, chapter 3, in Mysticism in the World’s Religions, Oxford: Oneworld, published 1995, page 20:

     To the pantheist or monist [mystical experiences] are experiences of the One, which is identical with himself, and which is probably the same in all religions and even in secular mysticism. In face of this easygoing tolerance or indifferentism it is perhaps not surprising that monotheists are often intolerant, believing that God has chosen them and by implication not others.

2. (more broadly) Relativism, agnosticism; apathy, indifference.
   • 1884, Vernon Lee, chapter 5, in The Countess of Albany‎^[2]:

     A creature, so to speak, only half awake, or awake, perhaps, only when she devoured her books and tried to puzzle out her mathematical problems; and going through life by the side of her jealous, brutal, sickly, drunken husband, in a kind of somnambulistic indifferentism, perhaps not feeling her miseries very acutely, and probably not envying other women their meaningless liberty, their inane lovers, their empty wholeness of life.

   • 1904, Joseph Conrad, Nostromo‎^[3], Part 2, Chapter Three:

     This life, whose dreary superficiality is covered by the glitter of universal blague, like the stupid clowning of a harlequin by the spangles of a motley costume, induced in him a Frenchified—but most un-French—cosmopolitanism, in reality a mere barren indifferentism posing as intellectual superiority.

3. (countable) An expression of such a doctrine or view.
   • 1913, George Bernard Shaw, Charles Dickens, edited by Dan Laurence and Martin Quinn, Hard Times‎^[4], London: Waverley edition, quoted in Shaw on Dickens, New York: Frederick Ungar, published 1984, introduction, page 34:

     Here and there you may still see a man—even a youth—with a single eyeglass, an elaborately bored and weary air, and a little stock of cynicisms and indifferentisms contrasting oddly with a mortal anxiety about his clothes.

4. (philosophy) The doctrine of absolute identity, i.e. that to be in thought and to exist are one and the same thing.

Related terms

• indifferentist
• indifferentistic

Translations

the doctrine that all religions are equally valid

• Portuguese: indiferentismo m