Hi John,
I'm up with a teething baby (fun, fun, fun) and I'd realllllllly like to be asleep... so my apologies if this reply is less coherent than it should be...
Originally posted by john9001
all religions are the same and they are all wrong. All religions have "rules" that they claim came from God/Allah/Zeus that you have to follow or something bad will happen to you. The rules came from men not some god.
the Muslims kill each other because one group says the holy men should be descendents of Muhammad, the other group says they should elected or something.
the Christians are even worse, (they have had more time to mess up) how many different sects of Christians are there, i lost count. The eastern orthodox hate the roman catholics, the protestants hate each other and the catholics and orthodox and the catholics say the rest are going to hell. Wars have been fought over minor differences.
the early Christians could not even decide which books to put in the new testament, or if Jesus was equal to god or only the son of god ( a lesser position).
Just a few points in response:
To make a blanket statement like your initial one with 100% certainty you would need to be god yourself, which I'm guessing you're not.
The worldview you appear to be espousing is called materialism. It states confidently that matter is all there is, was, and ever will be, that the Universe is a closed system. There is no God in this system so he cannot interfere with his creation, hence miracles or even providence are impossible, and since he does not exist to communicate with people, revelation from him is impossible. In this system life is an utterly meaningless, ethics are baseless, and to paraphrase Nagel, existence is a brief blip between two oblivions. I'm also guessing you've never really run this worldview to its logical conclusions and are happily living with a bunch of inconsistencies.
Personally, even at the most anti-theistic point, I never gave much serious thought to embracing Materialism (or its related philosophies). Today it seems even more absurd to me than ever. Aside from its logical problems, I've just seen and personally experienced too many examples of Divine intervention to give it much thought.
You also appear to be using a hermeneutic of absolute suspicion, based on your presupposition that "all religions are false because none can be true."
Now if I came on the board and responded to all the political threads by saying "all political perspectives are wrong" because they have caused conflict and division and further that because SOME politicians have done evil things and are corrupt, ALL politicians including Washington, Lincoln, Gandhi, Churchill have been evil and corrupt I sense you'd see the obvious flaws in my reasoning.
As far as your comments about actual religions. There are many more conflicts in Islam than just the one between the Shias and Sunnis, but that one stems from the Shi 'ite belief that Ali, the cousin of the prophet should have been the next Caliph instead of his Uncle Abu Bakr, etc.
And contrary to Da Vinci Code pseudo history, actually the Christians were fairly well decided on which books were part of the canon long before the council of Nicea met in 325 to attempt to decide the conflict between the Arians and the orthodox. For instance by the end of the 2nd century we have several lists and references by church fathers that include all 27 of the books of the NT and which
do not include the so-called Gnostic gospels (actually the arguing in the church was not over whether the Gnostic works were canonical, it was over the apocryphal works like
The Shepherd of Hermas).
Anyway John, judge a religion based upon its truth claims and the life and teachings of its founders and
the best and most consistent practioners of it not the
worst. So for instance, judge Christianity by Jesus and the Apostles and Islam by Muhammad and the first Caliphs.
- SEAGOON
