How can both Judaism and Paganism be 'wrong', yet Christianity 'right'?
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How about I write a new book - let's call it The Modern Testament (this would be the 3rd Testament).
I then construct a new religion from it - in a similar vein to the NT.
Then 50 years later I claim that the religion of the NT is wrong. (ie: the real God is a new character)
isn't this the same thing as the NT writing off the Hebrew Bible?
Yep, but this is how religion operates in general. I am sure there are a few that are created from whole cloth (Scientology comes to mind), but for example, Judaism leveraged the local Canannite religions, Christianity leverage Judaism, Islam leveraged Christianity, the Mormon's leveraged Christianity, Sufism and the Ba'hai leveraged Islam, and so on. Most religions want to claim that their truth has existed from the beginning of time, and is not some recent invention, so they spin off of an existing tradition and appropriate its roots. The same pattern is evident in the "eastern" religions. It really is an evolutionary process...
Religion needs to establish its bona fides with either a link to antiquity, proving that this is an eternal truth, or a divine revelation, proving that this is from God, or preferably both.
but if pagan beliefs are supposedly 'wrong' then why did they incorporate them into Christianity in the first place?
is this a tacit admittance that some pagan beliefs may in fact be 'correct'?
Why use these pagan beliefs to convert people when they are not right.
Becuase all religion is a fallacy. Nothing about it makes sense. And those who are believers are merely lazy atheists: they don't believe in all gods...except one. They take the effort to deny all others but stop short of denying the very last one. What makes them follow their cult more than any other cult? Anyone that considers things logically can't possibly be a believer, logic and belief simply can't coexist.
Generally the smarter the person, the less likely they are to believe. There are exceptions...my own father is a great example of someone who is brilliant yet still believes in religion (he was hugely successful in business, was ranked in the top 1% of all students at a 3,000+ student magnet school in NYC, came from poverty and an uneducated family to get accepted at the most selective university in the country, had a major corporation pay for him to get his master's at an Ivy League school), but for the most part the religious people are very unlikely to be highly intelligent. Sure, they will be successful in business, but that's not about intellectualism. Just look at this list of Atheists in Science and Technology...it's nearly every name you can think of. Religion impairs the mind's ability to think critically, and that to me is the biggest cancer we have on society.
well I've been through a few religions over the last couple of years and am gradually ticking them off the list!
Most for being too man made and counter-intuitive, eg: Christianity, Buddhism, Islam, Judaism, Wicca, Hinduism, Hare-Krishna, Scientology.
but I seem to have ended up with Druidism - perhaps the last bastion before athiesm?
Nature is the only 'proof' we have of a maybe.
If you think 99% of what constitutes modern 'Druidism' is not man-made, you need to be more critical of your sources. That does not mean it is not intuitively inclined towards a form of spirituality based on natural order, mind you, but it is as artificial as any religion and has very little precedence to boot. It is certainly not reflective of the religion of the ancient Celtic peoples any more than a church service at a mega church represents the spiritual congregation of Christians in the 1st century AD.
Quote:
Originally Posted by Kenneth-Kaunda
I'm surprised there isn't much more support for a Worldwide religion.
a kind of Supreme Being over them all.
Between Christianity and Islam, about 1/3 of the world's population is under the banner of of a worldwide religion with a single Supreme Being (the god of Abraham). Not too shabby especially since those religions are growing rapidly in the most densely populated parts of the world.
How about I write a new book - let's call it The Modern Testament (this would be the 3rd Testament).
I then construct a new religion from it - in a similar vein to the NT.
Then 50 years later I claim that the religion of the NT is wrong. (ie: the real God is a new character)
isn't this the same thing as the NT writing off the Hebrew Bible?
No, not really. Christianity never claimed that the God of the so-called OT was "wrong". Instead, they claim a new message was received from God--that he is available to ALL people, not just the Jews, and that God is available to non-Jews without them being required to follow the Jewish laws. It's just natural that areas outside of Palestine/the Middle East were going to begin to view God differently based on their own cultural norms and experiences.
LOL, nobody sat down and said, "Hey, let's invent a new religion based off this old one." The writings that form what's called the New Testament and the new religion itself developed over time. Hell, Judaism itself has changed and split and developed over time. Get the Lubavitchers, the Orthodox, the Modern Orthodox, the Reformed, the Conservative Jews into the same room and see how well THEY all agree! (Just came from reading the Judaism thread where one Jew is berating another for helping cancer patients on the Sabbath.)
And your construction of a new religion on top of basic Christianity wouldn't be anything new anyway--Islam did it, proclaiming Christianity to be wrong and supplanting it with a new book of their own. Joseph Smith and his Mormons already wrote your Third Testament--adding a new book on top of the OT and the NT, and Christianity itself has revised itself in different forms hundreds of times.
Why stop at just Jews and Pagans. There are a little more than 10,000 religions here on earth so my question is then naturally.......
How can both Judaism and Paganism plus 9,997 other religions be 'wrong', yet Christianity 'right'?
Well, ALL those religions think they are right. And within Christianity and Judaism and Islam and Hinduism etc are subsets of all those religions who think THEY are right, too.
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(Just came from reading the Judaism thread where one Jew is berating another for helping cancer patients on the Sabbath.)
