While we were in Saigon, Valerie and I went to check out the Cao Dai temple at Tay Ninh. Cao Daism is a 20th-century religion founded in Vietnam, and claims a few million followers worldwide. I'm not sure how it's regarded among the Vietnamese, but I can imagine how it'd be thought of in the US. (Side note: as one who was raised atheist, I find all religions pretty strange; some seem to have merely had greater legitimacy conferred on them by dint of having been around for so long. So anything here should be taken as curiously amused, but not disparaging.) It is, if nothing else, a very colorful religion, even more so within the cathedral than without.
From what I understand, which isn't much, Cao Daism is a mishmash of various belief systems, primarily Buddhism, Confucianism, and Taoism, but with dashes of Christianity, Judaism, and Islam, among others. One of the premises is that the large number of religions has caused God's message to be lost, so they're trying to 'bring it back', as it were. God, by the way, is represented by the All-Seeing Eye, which looks remarkably similar to the symbol found on the back of the US$1 bill. Anyway, the Cao Daists are about uniting humanity, overlooking differences between people, and peace and understanding, which all sounds pretty good to me.
If I'm getting this right, God often tries to relay his message through cultural means or intermediaries (their saints, who have appeared in visions, and are sort of like prophets, I guess). The three major saints are thus Sun Yat-Sen (of Chinese nationalism), a Vietnamese poet laureate named Nguyen Binh Khiem, and Victor Hugo.
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