Religious Freedom

[Alex]

Originally Posted by Prudence

I'm having a hard time seeing that as anything other than a dig.

I don't mean it as a dig, honestly. Change it to "deciding that Gandhi was a pretty good guy based only on the writings of his mother" and my question is the same, if you can't trust the only source of information, how do you decide the truth.

And I'm not asking anybody to prove that God exists. For the sake of discussion I concede the point. In this case, I'm asking how, if you otherwise discount the Bible, you decide what Jesus's message was?

Is there a scheme to how some religious/spiritual ideas are embraced (for example, Jesus says to love everybody) while others are tossed aside (for example, Jesus says to avoid contact with lapsed Christians).

No, I don't think everybody with faith is silly, but I do think they're wrong. But then they think the same of me. So, faced with a selection of 100, in my view, equally wrong things (from the Greek pantheon through animism and into the various flavors of monotheism), I'm curious how most people manage to pick one of those as true but still agree that the other 99 are false.

This analogy may look like a dig, again, but I don't mean it as such. If 100 people came to me saying 2+2 equals everything from 20 to 119 I'd say "no, you're all wrong." But from my point of view, religion\spirituality is someone saying "no, you're all wrong. Except the guy who said 2 plus 2 is 38." Why?

If it is simply "I looked deep inside myself and this is the truth I found" then fine. That a non sequiter to me, but I can't argue with it. But when other religious views are condemned, as they have been in this thread, I again get curious as the basis for assuming that when other people similarly look deep inside themselves they find the wrong answer.

No, nobody is under any obligation to discuss these things, but I don't feel bad for asking the question.