Why do you think your religion is the right one? Why do you think your holy book is correct, but all the other ones aren’t? Why do you think your prophet spoke to God, but other prophets didn’t?
I don’t. I grew up in Andean Peru, and many of our native Quechua beliefs were blended with Catholicism during the conquest. Perhaps because of this, I was raised to believe that God /Divinity was as people percieved him/it/them, and it was not for me to determine. It was as natural to assume there was a Catholic Jesus as it was to assume that there was a Pachamama (Mother Earth). Both were true. All are. I have a hard time negating anyone’s claim to understanding their spirit. I don’t feel it’s my place.
So then you negate anyone who takes a narrow view of their spirit and says it’s the only right one?
And I came to the same conclusion from being an aging hippy!
(addressing the OP) I don’t always believe, I rarely mostly believe, and I NEVER completely believe, but it’s a convenient place to hang my hat. It’s a wonderful origin story, if you don’t dissect it too much, and I like enough of the message that I can go along with it.
But not some of the Sayings Gospels. They’re effing NUTS. Same with most of the non-Judeo-Christian ones. At least with the JC ones I can say, “Yeah, that’s a ~450BC legal document. Was written by a scribe of Cyrus the Great, but it is at least authentic.”
The survival & thriving of the Jewish people and the Christian faith in spite of countless attempts to exterminate both.
The compelling message of Jesus of Nazareth- both His ethical teachings, and His redemptive death & resurrection.
The “70 weeks prophecy” of Daniel 9 (written at the latest around 160 B.C., though I believe earlier) that indicates the time of Jesus’s ministry, His execution and the destruction of the Temple & Jerusalem soon thereafter.
I don’t think he does. I think he’s more openminded than most of my Xtian friends. And I don’t get where you see he (she) does. One can find FAR more closed-minded beliefs on this board.
Ted, my pal, a persistent belief does not play to a Christian’s system. The Hindus and Jews screw you completely.
It’s great, isn’t it? But I can toss it away like a soiled glove had He shown any proof.
Kid, love you as I may,that is a prophecy force-fed into reality. I’ll leave it to Diogenes to explain it. Face it–we both belong to “feel-good” faiths. I because I admit the odds are against it (Hey, I’m Irish and LOVES me a losing cause) . You because you don’t. 
I believe my religion is right* for me* because my life works better when I do. I’m actually very much agnostic at the moment, and things kinda suck. It’s a cycle, faith will return, my spiritual practice will return, but right now it’s all pretty bleak. And as a consequence, other things in my life, like my schooling, my family, my marriage, are kind of bleak as well. This too shall pass.
I’ve tried a lot of religions on for size over the years. Raised without religious indoctrination at all, I tried on Catholocism, Lutheranism, Baptist and “Christian” religions as a teen. Older, I investigated Judaism, Buddhism, Hinduism, Shintoism, Sufism, Wicca, Asatru, the Golden Dawn, Santeria and Voudoun. None of them felt right or made my life better. My own brand of eclectic neopaganism and western Hermeticism does.
The nice thing about my religion is that I don’t have to believe it’s the right one for everyone. Like atomicflea, I suspect that God/dess, being too complex for total comprehension by humans, has shown Itself to many people in many different ways over the centuries, depending on the lessons, messages, forms and faces those people needed. It’s not for me to determine what works for other people.
For the same reason I like sex: it feels right. 
That’s a flip answer, but the spiritual epiphanies I have had did not point me toward any one religion or incarnation of God or angels or that. They pointed me toward spirituality and a love of humanity, and I was brought up a Christian. I went back to that faith because I knew the hymns and I like the smell of sandalwood.
It helps that I do believe at least some of it – there does seem to have been a historical Jesus, though whether he cursed fig trees and transmuted some early Kool-Aid* and got resurrected is a matter, for me, of unimportance. His message of love still resounds.
“But you’re ignoring all the bad parts of Christianity!” I suppose I am. I did not decide that because I wear a little silver cross I must hate Muslims, gays, and women. Maybe because I have been known to work on the Sabbath day I am a horrible Christian. Okay, but I’ve still been a decent person and been good to people on Earth. Works for me.
I have no stake in being right. I could be wrong. Thor could be laughing at me in the afterlife. Allah may set me straight on the whole Muhammad business. I could be reborn a slightly surprised dog.
*A friend was informed once that alcohol was evil; upon asking why Jesus made wine if alcohol was evil, he was told that Jesus’s wine was in fact non-alcoholic. “So Jesus’s first big miracle was to turn water into Kool-Aid?” I asked. I am irreverent, even with deep personal beliefs.
Because I find that the teachings of Jesus Christ correspond to what I observe in the world around me, because I know so many honest and intelligent people who have a personal relationship with Jesus Christ, because the Christian intellectuals I’ve read have defended their beliefs better than any rivals, because the evidence from so many fields of human endeavor supports Christian beliefs, because Christian civilization has been the main driving force of human progress for centuries, and because the lives of the Saints (both capital S and lower case s) testify to the correctness of the message of Jesus Christ.
Of course I do not believe that Jesus Christ was a prophet who spoke to God, but rather thae He was God. If you’re asking why I don’t believe the Prophet Mohammed spoke to God, the best answer was the one given by my minister: “I just don’t believe that God would choose an ass like Mohammed to be a prophet.” Mohammed may have been a prophet but he obvious would fit better as a bureaucrat. Yes, no, do this, don’t do that, pray five times a day, take a pilgrimage to Mecca, etc… He wants to squash all human life into a mechanical routine.
Because I was raised in it, because I have a personality type conductive to believing in a religion, and because I believe religion is good for me.
I’m not stupid, you know.
That doesn’t mean I don’t believe; it just means I don’t feel the need to preach. All religions are basically the same, after all, but my religion is mine, and I’m going to stick with it.
Because it’s mine. My own understandings. Not someone else’s shrinkwrapped package of beliefs.
I do not as of yet have a holy book. I haven’t had time to write one. (Even then it won’t be a holy book in the sense that the Koran or the Bible are to fundamentalists of relevant faiths. I would like other people to consider my understandings to see if they find them to have explanatory power in their own lives, but I would be horrified if folks gilded it and started bookworshipping the damn thing)
I don’t hold those attitudes. The description is never the thing itself. My book, if I do write it, will be mere chicken scratches on parchment. (Well, bits on a hard drive platter). An attempt by a limited person in a limited communications medium to engage in the subjective art (not science) of communication with other people. I think zillions of people have understandings of something important yet abstract; some of us use words like “God” or “Allah”, to ourselves and/or to others, when thinking about that, while others do not.
I would suggest you would learn more if you pretend that the word “God” is simply not defined in your dictionary and that you have no freaking idea what people mean when they use that word, except insofar as they explain or define it to you. (And if you yourself do not use it, it might be useful to explain to them that it is an undefined word for you and that they need to define it if they expect you to understand them).
If I’m understanding the question correctly, you mean to say do I think that people who think their take on religion/spirituality is the ‘right’ one **for everyone **are wrong? Yes. Do I think that it’s possible it’s the only right one for them? Of course.
I think that an understanding of the spirit and your relationship with your existence is a deeply personal thing. I consider myself religious, but I respect the hell out of my brother, who is an atheist, because he arrived at that conclusion by a really thorough rational process that he’s satisfied with, and he’s never tried to convince me of his reasoning or win me over to his side.
Oh, no, you didn’t!
Did you really want to start the year setting yourself up like that?
Shall I go for my notes on Daniel, or just wait for you to be nailed by others on the board, while I concentrate on more fun threads? (I suppose that’s actually an aside to myself.)
I have time for a few brief comments on 1 & 2.
Leaving the Jewish people aside for now, at least, there was never really any danger of the Roman Empire stamping out the Christian faith. My WAG is that by the time the would-be “exterminators” became really serious, it had spread to regions outside their control. Even if not the case, there were plenty of ways to hide inside, and buy time. The Emperors were mostly concerned about their dogmatism and resulting “defiance.” And so believers would likely have survived by adapting. The “Christianity” we have now pays little attention to what its founder actually said, in many areas, so your claim is pretty much an historical JOKE, anyway.
(Did the Romans even execute many non-leaders? Aren’t we talking about pious propaganda when crowds of rank-and-file filled the lions’ stomachs?)
Where to start here? Did you even know that no “Nazareth” existed in his time? :rolleyes:
Let’s talk about messiah-claimant #237 (or so) of Palestine for a bit.
Has anyone really shown on SDMB or elesewhere that ANYTHING he is supposed to have said was really new?
I’m interested in looking for analysis about how much he said was actually what a Pharisee would say, even though he was shown as pretty much always in conflict with them as a whole.
And isn’t it pretty much moot anyway? Most Christians pefer to skip over the bulk of what he taught, quoting instead from their beloved Paulie, and only focus on his supposed “mission” on earth instead. (Much intellectual hypocrisy here?)
- “Jack”
I could go into many reasons, including a dark period of my life where I met the enemies of our Lord Jesus face to face. But it’s not one religion is right and the others are all delusions, but they are all real, all gods, even the worship of men is submitting to man as god. We get to chose which one we want, if it be man, a lesser god or the one true God - the creator of heaven and earth. God allows us this choice.
The Lord Jesus is the only one who offers unconditional Love - Love demonstrated by Him taking my punishment, irrevocable salvation no matter what we do, His own Spirit living in us, His very name He gives us (we get to use God’s own name and that comes with power), a promise never to leave us AND, for me personally has shown and proven beyond my satisfaction that He has the power to keep all His promises.
He didn’t say that at all. He said he had a hard time negating anyone’s.
Could you elaborate on this a little, please? Some posters seem to disagree with you here, and it would be helpful to me to understand what they are disagreeing with.
I don’t know if you meant this as a wider question or just for atomicflea. But yes, I do think people who believe their way is the only right one are mistaken. Some are simply ignorant and others are evil. Depends on how virulently they believe this and what they do about it.
That being said, I also don’t believe that *every *belief and behavior cloaked in religion is okay, either. I think that actions which infringe on another’s free will or which violate human rights or treat people differently based on gender, color or orientation are wrong and should be stopped, even if they are part of a religion. Into this category I’d put child brides and single gender polygamy as well as mandatory covering (from “modest dress” to burqas), condemnation of homosexuality, female genital mutilation and single gender priesthood.
God told me not to worry too much. I decided, thereupon, that I had to have some religion, and I think Catholicism is the closest thing to being “right” we have.
I’m having a bit of trouble understanding this concept. It seems to me that most religious claims are factual, not opinions. It is either true or false that Jesus is the son of God. It is either true or false that God spoke to Muhammed. It is either true or false that God will send certain people to hell. It is either true or false that God wants us to get baptized and take communion. Whether it is in some way right for you doesn’t matter. The whole “Well, my religion is right for me” just doesn’t make sense to me.
How do you know that the one true God is actually the one true God and not a lesser god? How do you know they’re not equal?
Why do you think Catholicism is the closest thing to being “right” that we have? Why is it closer to being “right” than Protestantism, Islam or any other religion?
Note: I’m not trying to say any of you are wrong, I just want to know why you believe the things you believe.