All Religions Lead to the same place... right?

I have been the unfortunate victim of this comment. The more unfortunate part is that it is accepted as urban fact, and not something that you can submit to Myth Busters for verification. Unlike gas mileage without your tailgate, or pennies dropped from the Empire State Building, we can't run a cute little test to verify the results. The sad fact is that you can't even rely on just visiting a few different churches and synagogues and mosques, you can't get the answer by looking at the origins of religions.

The closest most people would be able to come to testing this is to look at the basic ideaologies of each group and making a side by side comparison, but even this is not fair, because it makes religions that are very different appear very similar, and religions with many similarities appear very different, for example:

A comparison of Christianity and Islam will yield many similarities: They both have a Heaven, they both have a personal God, they both claim to be the only way.

This leads many people to falsely assume that they are "essentially the same, they are saying the same thing, they just misunderstand each other"

This is a problem because these people have likely never considered Islam as an option for their personal faith. They likely know someone who is islam and that's all the farther their knowledge goes, along with popularized ideas like "It's only fundamentalists who bomb buildings" "Islam and Christianity are like brother religions, they both come from Judaism"

The problem is that most of these statements are false, and unless you let yourself set a foot inside Islam, you are unlikely to ever know that. Muslims can lie to infadels to get them into their religion, so to get a straight answer, you sometimes have to pretend to be one (depending on the fundamental factor of who you are talking to)

and let me straighten out the record on "Fundamentalist" Fundamentalists does not = Terrorists. A fundamentalist is one who believes that their principles ought to be strictly and literally followed. (really similar to the definition of a bigot, huh?)
A fundamentalist basketball player is good at basketball, he takes the principles of dribbling, fouls, baskets, zone defense, out of bounds, etc etc. literally. A non fundamentalist basketball player will very quickly find himself ejected from the team for such beliefs as "I view dribbling more as a metaphor than a physical action. I don't think they really meant for us to bounce the ball off the floor. That's so difficult!" or "Out of bounds is just something that referees added to scare people so that they could have more power, they are so limiting that there is no way a good game would be played with them"
Take this from sports to religion. suddenly comments like "The Bible was changed by King James, so we can't trust it" and "I can't believe that a good God would send people to hell, that seems to harsh" and "When Jesus said 'be perfect' I don't think he really meant perfect" take on a whole new meaning, it's like joining basketball and looking incredulously at the rules saying "this can't be right" In the end non-fundamentalists don't practise whatever it is they claim to practise, just like a basketball player trying to take a shot from the twenty-third row of the bleachers behind the backboard, and claiming that he scored a point because he hit the court isn't really a basketball player.

That being said, when I read the Bible, I am lead to believe that a funamentalist Christian would think that Jesus is God and literally rose from the dead. That both Heaven and Hell are actual places and that God takes his holiness and sin very seriously. Furthermore a fundamentalist christian should have very high standards for his brothers and sisters in Christ, and a lot of grace for those who do not, choosing death at their hands over renunciation of Christ as the only way to heaven.

When I read the Koran I would believe that a fundamentalist mulim should think that Allah chose his people to lead the world to salvation, and that those who resist or get in the way need to be removed, heaven is a place of luxuries abounding where Allah will reward me for faithful service, and those whom do not follow him are destroyed to nonexistance. The primary goal is to get everyone on earth following Allah by any means necessary, and Allah himself is a bit enigmatic, drawing us to truth by telling us what we need to know.

These are extremely different religions that people claim have the same end, and that end is usually named at being "be a good person" I see nothing in either of these declaring this to be the end. They seem to indicate that God either wants people to know him personally, or people to follow and fear him, but nothing about just being a good person.

Frankly, "knowing someone who is bhuddist and knowing someone who is Christian" doesn't qualify you to say you have researched religions, and knowing someone who is a "Christian Bhuddist" who says they both believe the same thing is not the same thing as knowing a Christian and a Bhuddist who can concur on every point, just like asking a beer pong player the rules is not the same as knowing the rules to ping pong and brewing.