With so much diversity of religion could it be that when you strip everything back, we all worship the same God?
It definitely sounds like a nice idea, but is this possible?
Well, let’s imagine I asked different people to describe my mum. One says she’s 5ft 4., has brown hair and wears skirts. Another tells me she is over 6ft and never wears skirts. Another says she has black hair. Of course it’s easy to see here that these people can’t all be describing my mum because they are making claims that are in direct contradiction to one another.
This is exactly what different religions do – they don’t just describe different aspects of God but they blatantly contradict each other. Hinduism believes in millions of gods, Buddhism doesn’t believe there is a personal God and Islam and Christianity both claim that their God is the only God. Christians believe Jesus is God but if you believe that in Islam, you have committed one of the worst sins. Each of these religions also describe different ways to be saved and they all believe they alone are true.
Of course, it is logically possible that all these religions are wrong, but it’s not possible for more than one to be right, it would be like saying my mum is both 5ft 4 and 6ft tall. If they can’t all be true, we can’t just blindly stick with the one we are most familiar with – we have to look at where the evidence points and see which one makes the most sense.
I’m Becky Gillespie from Thinking Matters and this has been your Thought for the Week. For more reasons to believe visit thinkingmatters.org.nz