In which I talk about religion
Isn’t it coincidental that everyone is born into the one true religion? Out of the many thousands of religions that exist today, and out of all the more that no longer exist, the one thing that nearly all of them have in common is that they each claim to be the one true religion and that all others are false. So as long as you were born into any religion, you’ve lucked out! But also you’re doomed.
Why do we believe in God? How did we get our belief in God? If every culture on Earth seemingly discovered their own deity or deities, then surely a god must exist to have inspired such a phenomenon, right? But then, if there is a god, why is he/she/it/them different in every culture?
A relatively new idea in certain apologetics suggests that while there is only one God, different cultures have naturally interpreted that God through their own cultural perspectives, thus producing many conflicting descriptions of what God is, while maintaining similar messages about what God wants. This is essentially a way of arguing that all religions are correct.
Personally, I think this argument taints and strips away too much of each religion’s accepted beliefs to even recognize the religions any more. Instead, what you are left with is a new religion, celebrating one arbitrary piece of an infinitely cryptic deity. I think it’s reasonable to say that either one religion is true, or none of them are… but certainly not all of them.
There are logical arguments for the existence of a god — perhaps this is why some of us believe… but I doubt it. The people who use these arguments already believed in God or had already learned of God long before they ever heard of Pascal’s Wager or the Cosmological Argument. These arguments serve as justification for the belief, not an entryway for it.
Now let’s assume that we have proven that a god exists. How then do we go about determining which one it is? Say we’ve logically proven that the universe must have had a creator — that’s about as far as we can get, right? How would we ever be able to prove that whoever or whatever that creator is is actually the Christian God as opposed to the Hindu Brahma or any of the other innumerable gods that have ever been believed in? Only our hopes can lend us to one or another. The best case our logical arguments for a god can ever hope to possibly make is simply Deism.
What it comes down to is conditioning. If you’d been born in Saudi Arabia, you’d have been conditioned growing up to be a Muslim. In the US, you’re most likely to be conditioned growing up as a Christian. But what bearing on the truth of these religions does being conditioned into them have? None. Nevertheless, that conditioning makes it very difficult for people to conceive their beliefs are wrong. All their lives, from as early as they can remember, everyone important to them believed, their culture was embedded with their beliefs, and fears of other beliefs and of not believing were routinely drilled into them. That’s most people’s story, whether they’re Hindu, Muslim, Mormon, Christian, or whatever. So I encourage you to investigate why it is you believe what you believe. How did it happen? And what does that mean about the truthfulness of your religion?
