That one religion is right and the rest incorrect, or that they are all incorrect.
They cannot be all right because they are all different. Look at Christianity. How many different churches and sects are there? Baptists, Methodists, Episcopals, Lutherans, Prespyterians (I know it’s spelled wrong!) Church of God, Church of Christ, Church of the Nazerene, Russian Orthodox, Greek Orthodox, Mormonism, Jehovah’s Witnesses, Pentecostals, Catholics, Primitive Churches, Pentecostalism, Foursquare, Word Faith, Worldwide Church of God, 7th Day Adventist, Congregationalist, Amish, and about 50,000 different kinds of independent churches with no affliation to anybody in particular.
Christianity has many sects, and offshoots from sects and so on. Islam itself has several schools of thought. Wahhabism, Shiite, Sunni. All three of these sects consider the other two conterfeit, even though they are all Muslims. Hinduism in India spawned Buddhism, which spanned Shintoism, Taoism and many schools and branches of Buddhism itself. Can’t all be right. Then what about people who subscribe to none of the major religions, or the last of the isolate tribes in the Amazon that worship bung beatles and the sun. Or those goofballs in the South Pacific who believe that last cargo is a sign of the gods.
It goes on and on. I don’t do church. I don’t like joining anything, nor do I need someone to help or guide me through a “spiritual journey.”
Nitpick: Buddhism didn’t spawn Shintō - Shintō was the indigenous animist religion of Japan prior to the Buddhist conversion; Buddhism just accommodated it. Same with the Bön religion in Tibet.
<Greek hero type is standing in front of Zeus on his throne>
Zeus: “Greetings, mortal hero. I am Zeus, King of the Gods!”
*<Zeus holds up one hand off to his side over an empty throne, gloved in a sock puppet with long blonde hair> *
Zeus (in a squeaky voice): “And I am Hera, his wife. Welcome to Olympus!”
Nope. Taoism is its own thing entirely. Confucianism is less a religion and more a deeply ingrained and respected philosophy akin to the West’s “Miss Manners”.
Note that I said vaguely related to, not evolved from. IIRC Tao is a philosophical idea that’s shared by both, and there’s speculation that Taoism came about as *a reaction to *Confucianism.
