All religions share some commonalities in moral traits, but that is about the extent of it.
Actually, many religions share both significantly more, and significantly less, then simple "moral traits". Many religions, both past and present, have common themes running throughout their respective mythic cycles. Many myths of the creation and destruction of the world are strikingly similar; myths of great floods washing away evil and giving rise to a new world are almost universal; virtually all the worlds major belief systems have some sort of cosmic war between divine beings at some point in their mythic cycles; tales of a fall-from-grace for some celestial being are also extremely common place. And of course, many pantheons have cognate deities that represent similar forces within their respective religions, beings who were often prayed to for assistance in their respective specialties (even Christianity is not exempt from this; many saints and angels, as well as the Virgin Mary, are often called upon for needs specific to their characters; i.e., the Archangel St. Michael is often considered to be a patron of the righteous who fight for good, such as soldiers and policemen; this practice is not unlike how many polytheists, including both the pagans of old and modern day polytheists, interact with their various gods on a level personal spirituality).
On the flip side of this, however, the actual morality of various religions of Man, and the cultures of said beliefs, vary greatly. Consider, Christianity considers suicide to be abominable (though martyrdom in service to the faith is favorable), yet a great many religions have considered suicide under specific circumstances to be extremely honorable: the Japanese and the Romans believed that suicide in the face of major public failure was favorable to a life of shame; and it is customary in some Indian communities for Hindu widows to burn themselves upon the pyres of their deceased husbands rather then continue living without him. Both Christians and the ancient polytheist Romans were very prudish in their attitudes towards sex and excess, while other religions, particular those of south Asia, as well as many pre-christian European cultures, consider sex not only something to be enjoyed, but exalted and holy. Many religions consider human sacrifice to be abhorrent, while others consider it not only sacred, but view the role of the sacrifice themselves to be one of great honor. While the religions of the world may have many common themes running through their cosmologies, their actual moralities vary greatly.
The God of the Bible is a distinct being who has revealed himself to mankind.....
Many other religions claim some sort of divine revelation verifying the existence of their respective deities; in fact, virtually all of them do so. Every belief system has it's holy men, formal or not, who are believed to be in direct communion with the Divine, and many members of every religion have claimed some sort of direct divine intervention in their lives. Many ancient civilizations had oracles and prophets who were believed to bring the words of the Gods to mortals. Virtually every mythic cycle has texts that are considered to be "unwritten", with no known mortal author, and therefore of celestial origin. In fact, the whole notion of divinely revealed literature can often form the basis of entire religions on their own; consider the Hindu Vedas, the Baha'i Kitáb-i-Aqdas, and even the Koran.
Even among the Abrahamic family of religions, which share a common body of beliefs and a historically significant line of prophets, no two of the three can agree on all the specific divine revelation. Most Jews largely view Jesus as a wise medicine man, hardly the savior of mankind. And while the Muslims recognize Jesus at least as a prophet, they also recognize a later prophet, Muhammad, a man who's life is irrefutable historical fact, and who experienced his own revelation at a time that is well within the realm of recorded history (and the product of that revelation was, of course, the Koran, a book which was not merely divinely inspired, but rather, "divinely dictated" to mortal man by God through his intermediary, the angel Gabriel.) and there are some Christian sects, such as the Mormons, who claim still later divine revelation.
Furthermore, there are historical figures outside of the Monotheist faiths that are labeled prophets by their own believers, with equally legitimate claims to the title. From the Persian Zoroaster to the Buddha, the history of the world is littered with the stories countless men who all found their own divine inspiration and would go on to found an innumerable array of belief systems, each with their own path to the Divine, and each claiming divine validation of said paths.
..... and not a human created subset of a bunch of different religions. He is not Vishnu, or Buddha, or some mystical life force, or whatever else.
How mankind perceives the divine is doubtlessly limited given the mortal state of man. At best, I suspect that our various Gods are a rough approximation of the true nature of Divinity. With that said, however, I really see nothing that makes the Christian God any more "real" then any other deity. There is no empirical evidence that can neither prove or disprove his existence, but by the same token, one can neither disprove the existence of Vishnu, Amaterasu, Zeus, Odin, Innana or any other divine being. Sure, you can disprove the existence of Gods on Olympus, or at least,
the Olympus in Greece, but that assumes that the Greeks literally believed that their Gods were actually living atop a mountain in their own country, rather then simply using "Olympus" as a name to describe a very lofty place befitting the Gods. The lines between truth, metaphor and poetic license are so often blurred and crossed in any religious and mythical text, it is doubtful there may even be any difference between Truth and Myth at all. After all, Faith means believing in something that cannot be proved, right? If that is the case, then how can
any Gods be proven to exist? Sure, you can say that you "feel the power of God" whenever you experience some sort of spiritual ecstasy, but by the same token, I could say I feel the presence of Zeus and Thor during a thunderstorm, or the presence of Venus and Inanna during sexual intercourse. Does feeling the presence of a God make them real? Perhaps it does, but does that really matter to anyone other then you or I? And furthermore,
should it matter if others acknowledge yours or my beliefs as legitimately inspired by a divine being?
Personally, I don't care one way or the other if my spiritual beliefs are shared by others, let alone actually acknowledged as being truly of divine origin. Belief is largely irrelevant in the day to day life of anyone anyways, but what
does matter is how those beliefs shape your own personal code of ethics and how those ethics frame your interaction with the wider world. To me, religion is less about knowing all the answers to the big questions, and more about having a framework with which to answer all the smaller questions in my own personal life, and from a purely pragmatic point of view, that is the function religion serves in the lives of all people. For me, I at least require a system of beliefs that is inclusive of all points of view, not simply one. Surely, I agree with certain viewpoints more then others, but that doesn't make me dismiss the others out of hand as being inherently "false" simply because they are not mine. I really do not understand why someone would want to cut themselves off from the possibility expanding their spiritual horizons when the path that best suits them may yet lie before them. Why gamble eternity on a single doctrine? Fear of eternal punishment for a lack of faith is not sufficient for me because I do not believe any God would (or perhaps even
could) punish someone for simply not believing, and because when only one religion out of the countless multitudes of faiths actually espouses such a belief (for what I strongly suspect to be a mostly conversion-oriented agenda), I tend to shy away from such an absolutist point of view. You may believe what you like, but you cannot merely dismiss the beliefs of others simply because your religion claims itself to be the best, because I assure you, many others of many faiths have done the same before you, and few of them agree on anything, let alone everything.
Topic: Church leavers (Read 7700 times)
