It has always puzzled me as to why the almighty prefers humans to worship him via a multiplicity of religions. At last count, there are several HUNDRED varieties of christianity, 3 flavors of judaism, and several brands of islam. If you throw in hinduism and animism, you have possibly thousands of religions.
The question is WHY? Is this deliberate? Or did God make mistakes over time?
If so, why hasn’t he followed up with revelations to put this right?
Anyone DARE to take this one?
I am unable to explain this state of affairs-being only human, I can offer no reason why this should be so!:smack:
There is a glaring assumption in your premise…
One could argue that the fundamental ethos is the same. Virtually all world religions have some version of the Golden Rule, the rest, to paraphrase Rabbi Hillel, is just commentary-- or culture.
<< shielding eyes from the glare >>
You are assuming that the reason there are so many religions is because God wants it that way. Why are you assuming this? Why not assume that the reason there are so many religions is because people prefer it?
Perhaps it’s not God who’s reponsible for the multitude of religions, perhaps it’s satan (and maybe people too). What do money counterfeiters do? They attempt to make the counterfeit money to look as much like the genuine article as possible. The purpose: to deceive. There’s real money and there’s fake money. Same with religions. In my view (which I know isn’t popular), there’s one true religion and it serves satan’s purpose to make sure their are plenty of counterfeits so as to confuse and deceive. This is my opinion of why there’s so many different religions.
So you think satan created all religions except one?
And that one true religion is…?
That’s what it sounded like to me, too.
Why does it have to be “Satan” that’s responsible for it? Can’t people just have decided all by themselves that they’d rather have a religion that went like this rather than one that went like that?
The question seems legitimate.
As a card-carrying Christian (among other beliefs) I have to speculate why then, if such things as chosing between Jesus and rejecting him are essential spiritual choices, are millions of other people not even given the information to make the choice?
As I understand my church’s doctrine, people who are never given the opportunity to accept Christ (for example those born before him, or who live on a desert island) are not necessarily damned, but are judged on somewhat different criteria than Christians.
We are all required to make as informed spiritual judgments as possible. That there are people who believe in deities I can hardly even imagine to be real is a test of my faith. What do I believe, and why do I believe? Could I convince a non-believer about Christ? Why not? Could I even defend the validity of my beliefs to a non-believer? I should at least be able to do that!
That there should be one, true, absolute religion is a concept that’s a form of test, too. My closest Christian friends have ideas (for example about heaven) that seem to me totally off the wall. But that can’t mean their faith is entirely different from mine. Equally, a Muslim’s faith can’t be entirely different from mine. That there are differences seems to be a form of religious test, in itself.
Well, in the Bible when God threw down the Tower of Babel and then forced everyone to speak different languages, why couldn’t he have influenced them to go into different religions as well. And to make things fair, all of them working off a fundamental premise?
IMHO, the many different religions that exist do so in order that people may choose their own path to the Creator. I like a math analogy that a friend once told me: 3+6=9; 3x3=9; 20-11=9; and so on. Does this mean that one form of math is ‘right’? No, only that there is more than one way to arrive at the right answer.
No, humans did. Over time, humans have interpreted the Holy Writings in their own way, sometimes mistakenly. Sometimes this was done innocently, sometimes to suit that persons’ purpose.
People of my particular Faith, which is called Baha’i, believe that He has followed up with revelations. We believe He has been revealing Himself to us since the beginning, via different Messengers (i.e. Abraham, Moses, Buddha, Christ, Baha’u’llah, and others), revealing to us parts of His message that we (mankind) were ready to hear.
As a Baha’i, I am allowed (encouraged, even) to answer questions regarding my Faith, but our Holy Book forbids proseletyzing, so before I cross into that territory, I’ll stop now, having put in my two cents. But I’m always willing to answer sincere questions.
Didn’t say it had to be satan, tho I lean toward that opinion. I’m simply throwing my .02 into the mish mash. All of the different relgions can’t be correct, no matter how much we would wish that to be. How can 2 things both be true, if they teach the exact opposite? As a Christian, I believe in one truth and one way for everyone. I tend to believe that satan knows there’s only one way, and he wants to confuse people; hence, you have all these relgions. That’s why Christians send missionsaries to all the different countries steeped in all these other religions to tell them about Christ and what He did for them. They’re following the Lord’s great commission to His disciples.
I’ve heard the belief that they’re all just different paths to God. Believing the Bible to be God’s word, I disagree with that premise since scriptrure states there is only one may to Him. So how can all religions be correct? In my view, theyr’e not. I can agree that people may also be responsible for differing relgions, either because of not being aware of the truth yet or from being deceived by satan or incomplete information.
Just more .02.
For the most part, don’t they all have the same underlying message (treat others as you would be treated)?
I do agree that most religions have teachings that are opposite of each other, but is it possible that these are a result of mankind as opposed to God?
It seems the universal (to me anyway) message is treat people good. The extra rules and laws are thrown in to safe guard mankind, by mankind (in my opinion); Such as don’t eat pork-AFAIK, at the time, if you ate pork you had a good chance of dying. I can think of no logical reason why eating a pig would be sinful (other than God commanding me not to).
Meatros is right. All religions teach the same thing: Treat people good.
What did Jesus say was the greatest commandment? From Matthew 22.
So how is this different from the teachings of any of the other world religions? “Treat people good.”
Assuming for the sake of argument that there is such a thing as Cosmic Evil personified as Satan, and assuming that he knows that Christianity is the only true religion, and assuming that the only reason we have many different religions today is because Satan is trying to tempt people away from Christianity…
Then what did he do with himself in the thousands of years before Christ? If this is true, and Satan knows that Christianity is the one true religion, and the only reason why we have all these other religions is because he’s trying to tempt people away from Christianity, then we ought to be able to look back in the historical record and see that before Christ, there were no multiplicity of religions, that there was only one world religion.
And this is not true.
The ancient Greeks and Romans had many cults, religions, and sects. These didn’t all suddenly spring into being in 33 A.D.–they dated from hundreds of years earlier.
And of course, all the pre-Christian non-Greek or Roman cultures had their own religions, the Celts and the Indians and the Egyptians and the Scythians and the Persians and the Chinese and the Carthaginians…
Not to mention the Jews. Where does Judaism fit in here?
So was this Satan, inspiring people to start up many different religions? If so, why would he bother, if he wasn’t trying to tempt people away from Christianity, since Christianity hadn’t been invented yet?
I think if Satan has a part to play, then his part is to muddy and water down the message. The message is muddied down, IMHO, to some extent. The concentration isn’t on treating people well, it’s on specific sins, who’s damned, who’s right, and the part science has to play. All of these things (and more) take away from the ultimate meaning.
The burden of proof rests on the person who says that he DID create all these religions.
In other words, postulating this as a possibility (a tenuous and unsubstantiated one, IMO) is a far cry from making it a valid premise.
Religion is one of those devastatingly equivocal terms.
For some, religion is a context of faith; for others, it is a context of politics. Assuming the former as the reference frame for the topic’s question, I would say that there are as many religions as there are people.
Every moral journey is unique. No two people have ever experienced the exact same thing in the exact same way from the exact same perspective at the exact same time. Each person acts out his moral play in an amoral mis-en-scene of atoms — the universe.
That sort of religion is not just part of God’s plan, in my opinion, but is His whole plan.
Hmm, I see what you’re trying to say there. But before Jesus came to earth, there was still one truth and one God. Still room for satan to keep people in the darkness of all tose cults, religions, and sects; in my view anyway. In the Old Testament, the true God was the God the Israelites worshipped. At least, when they weren’t falling by the wayside as they had the tendency to do over and over. Through Moses, God brought the Israelites out of slavery in Egypt by many miracles and yet, after all that, just because Moses was up on the mountain talking to God longer than they thought he should be, they turned around and built a golden calf to worship. So I’m pretty sure satan was active back then just as he is now. In fact, he started in the garden of Eden.
Actually he was the ONE God for Isreal. He never tells them to go convert the rest of humanity; nor that the others won’t see the next life. He never says that the other people’s Gods don’t exist or are evil. Only that they aren’t the right God for Isreal. I’ll leave aside the discussion about how the Christian view of Heaven and Hell is not consistent with it’s Jewish roots.
We’ll have to get Zev or Chaim in here to be more specific, but the Laws of the OT apply to Jews. In their view, we gentiles have far fewer rules to follow to be acceptable.
If only all the gods would compete and slug it out. Then we would know which one was the real one, or at least the most powerful, and we could all worship correctly.
I sure hope they don’t do it my backyard, tho. Someone could get hurt.
Start here – enter YOUR god in The Great God Contest.