Path: christian Newsgroups: soc.religion.christian From: Charles Hedrick Subject: Re: Religious Statement Approved: christian@aramis.rutgers.edu "Chris" says: > I'm young, 17 to be exact and a little confused on a religious matter. >There are many religions in the world today, correct? Now people in a >particular religion are convinced that his or her religion is THE religion >and the only true religion to live by. In summary, he makes the following points: how can I know my religion is right? we follow the religion of our parents where did others come from? people are forced into religion by fear we're all praying to the same presence no one should say their way is more right I think I'm going to have to deal with this in parts. A good answer requires a complete treatment of apologetics. 1) I'm afraid I'm not prepared to sit down and write such a work at one sitting. 2) If I did, I doubt anyone would read it. So I'm going to pick what I think is the first issue for this posting, and see if I can make progress on additional issues later. The one I'm going to focus on now is the existence of right and wrong answers. You have to be convinced of the possibility of right and wrong answers, or it's hopeless for me to say anything else. The next topic would then be how you decide among religions. I should note that I am somewhat influenced in this response by a book I happen to be reading, Alister McGrath's /A Passion for Truth/. However the posting is mine, and you shouldn't hold him responsible for it. ------------------- I understand where you're coming from. It can be pretty discouraging to see the number of different opinions and practices around the world. As I've commented in a previous posting, I think God may make some allowances for our ignorance. Thus it is possible that people who are members of the "wrong" religion may still have a saving faith in him. However I think the conclusion you've come to is the wrong one. At least as you've stated it, it's a completely relativistic one: there is no right or wrong; it doesn't matter what I do. How far are you willing to take that? Do you believe the "presence" doesn't care whether you carry out human sacrifice? It seems to me that you're being confused by two extreme viewpoints: conservative Christians who say you must be a conservative Christian or be damned, and relativists who say that nothing matters. I think these views are both wrong. I think you're right to reject the extremely narrow position of some Christians. I believe God will make allowances for our background, and if we actually repent of our sins and depend upon him for salvation, he will do so even if we are wrong in some areas. But I think you need to look just as carefully at the extremely broad position of the relativists. I think they are failing to do justice to the true variety of religions. It's not like religions just have slightly different methods of worship, or their holy books tell somewhat different stories about God. Religions have very different ideas of what reality is like, and about the direction in which we are and should be going. There are religions that do not believe there's a God at all. There are religions that want us more or less to vanish, and others that provide techniques to help us build up our will and power. It is very hard for me to imagine that people trying very hard to reach very different goals are somehow all going to end up in the same place. If that happens, God is doing something that I think is rather peculiar: he's basically ignoring our intentions and actions, wiping out what we've done, and sticking us somewhere that most of us probably had no desire to be. If he's going to do that, it seems peculiar that he would put us on earth and ask us to make decisions in the first place. [Note that I'm assuming you are a theist of some sort. If you think there's no god and no afterlife, then your claims become true in a trivial way: everyone ends up dead and rotting, and so it didn't matter what religion you followed.] I think there is actual right and wrong. There are some things that we really shouldn't do. On many of them, there is fairly good agreement among religions: many religions disapprove of murder, etc. But not all of them do. Do you know about the Thugs? That's an example of a religion at least part of whose beliefs I think are pretty obviously wicked. (Actually, it is a small cult within a larger religion -- similar examples could be found of cults within Christianity, such as the Jim Jones group.) If there is genuine wrong, and if there is actually some sort of God or god-like thing, then God has to make some response to wrong. Or choose not to, which I'll count as a response. Various religions have different answers to what his response is. They range from those who say that God will vanquish it without our help, to those who want to elist us in his army, those in which either he or the devil drafts us for their respective armies, and those in which he started the ball rolling, and now looks in only ocasionally to see what is happening. These cannot all be true. And which one is true affects greatly what we should do. Again, I am not saying that we're necessarily damned if we make even one error. It may be that we think that God cares what we do, but that our response is completely up to us, and in fact God is providing us grace to help us decide properly. Despite that error, we may end up repenting and having faith in God. But if we think God doesn't care, and decide to live for ourselves, and God actually does care, we may well have made an error that matters. (I'm simply giving examples of differences. Don't assume this is the only kind of error I think can matter.) Our error may start out simply an intellectual error. But intellectual errors have a nasty habit of affecting what we do. If we live our whole lives on the basis of an error, it may have a profound effect on our character, and the kind of life we live. I think you are the victim of the classic error of liberalism. Liberalism is scandalized by the thought that one particular viewpoint is right and others are wrong. But in areas other than religion, it is obvious that right and wrong does exist, and matters. If engineers make a mistake in building a bridge, it falls down. If politicians make a mistake with the economy, we have a depression. The world is full of areas where there are right and wrong answers, and where wrong ones have consequences. A lot of people are busily trying to convince you that large areas of life don't have right and wrong answers: This is particularly obvious in the area of morals, but politics is getting pretty fuzzy too: a lot of politicians survive by convincing people that you should elect people who sound plausible, not people who understand what approaches will actually work. In large areas of public policy, no one is bothering to look carefully at evidence. The viewpoints that win are those that *sound* like they care about people, the environment, etc. You find it hard to understand how there can be such a variety of views in religion, and only one be right. Use public policy as a model. Some debates probably are a matter of opinion: it may be that some people would prefer the world one way and some another, and there's no "right" answer. But in many debates, you can pretty easily define the result people want: lower crime, lower pollution, lower unemployment, etc. But even in these issues there are number of parties, making completely contrary claims. In some cases, we don't have a way of knowing in advance which one is right. In a surprising number, we do, but people listen to plausible frauds instead. But the point is, there is an actual answer. You may not know how to tell who is right, but once you pick a policy, something is going to happen: crime will go up or down, etc. There are actual answers, even if no one knows them. What I'm asking you to take from all of this is that the world is a complex place with lots of disagreement. You yourself have indicated why: people follow the beliefs of their parents or friends, or are motivated by emotion. But that doesn't mean all answers are right. Quite the contrary. It means that lots of groups of people are doing things that cause quite serious damage. Consider the Soviet Union. They bought into a theory of government and economics that was plausible but wrong. It is not entirely clear whether they're going to be able to recover from it. The fact that there are many religions, and people follow the religion of there parents, does not suggest to me that there is no right and wrong in religion. Rather, it makes religion look like any other area where it's difficult to tell what is right. But in most other areas, something actually is. Unless you repeal the laws of logic, many religions are wrong. (Logically, it could be that all of them are.) That doesn't mean all their members are damned. But if you assume that religion is like other areas, it seems just as likely that there could be religious catastrophes as political or economic catastrophes. The only difference in religion is that God may choose to save us from those catastrophes, while physical and economic laws are not so forgiving. Note however that the concept of God as intervening to save us from ourselves already has some specific religious content. If you assume that's going to happen, you've ruled out religions that deny God's existence, religions that think he started the ball rolling and doesn't do anything, and religions that believe he allows us to decide on our own which side we're on. In fact, given the culture you grew up in, I think it looks suspiciously like a Christian concept (though there are other religions that would agree). Furthermore, there's quite a difference between saying that there is right and wrong in religion, but God will save us from certain kinds of mistakes, and saying that all religions are equally true. The first makes sense (though it may not be true). The second violates basic principles of logic. More later.