Is it possible that all religions are attempts to explain one inexplicable thing?
Okay, this one’s a doosey.
I first want to clarify that I am NOT an atheist, and I am not trying to DISPROVE anyone’s religion (that’s always implied by someone).
Onward…I grew up in a normal presbyterian household going to church every Sunday, and I went to both Baptist and Catholic schools. I spent my summers at an Episcopal camp here. I like to think I pretty much ran the gambit as far as Christian denominations go.
In the last several years, I’ve done a lot of traveling. I’ve had the opportunity to make contacts with many people from Nigeria to Taiwan and Columbia to Belarus. As a result, I spent my last year of college taking courses that would help to understand the cultures of my new friends.
Well, religion is obviously a big part of culture, so I studied Taoism, Islam, tribal religions, Buddhism, Confucianism (not sure if that’s really a religion). I started saying to myself more and more, “That’s not so different from Christianity.”
Now, I know someone’s going to jump on that. I’m not saying that the ceremonies and traditions in religions area ll the same, but it seems to me that their PURPOSE is the same as well as their core precepts.
It seems to me that all religions are an attempt to explain the same inexplainable thing: God. For so many reasons. As I said, their similarities, but also their evolution (study the developement of Buddhism, and it is so similar to the development of Christianity in the West) and the WHERE they were developed (it seems that they follow the spread of humanity from the fertile crescent out <-------does that make sense? might be a stretch).
Then there are other things, like the legends that http://www.tombofjesus.com/ after surviving the resurrection and that Buddha was actually canonized by accident as, I think, St. Josaphat.
Is anyone getting what I’m trying to ask?
I sure hope so.