Thread: No Religion??
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Old 06-27-2007   #38 (permalink)
Ilya
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Join Date: May 2007
Location: Toronto
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Default Re: No Religion??

Quote:
Originally Posted by suoko View Post
I dont't think religion won't ever end.
I just hope monotheistic ones will end soon.
If you think ONE God exists, you can identify with it, therefore you can incidentally guess you're superior to something else.
If, on the contrary, you believe in Gods (think of Roman and Greek ones, or other animistic religions) you can identify yourself with one of them. And no Gods is superior to any other god. They all have their own pros and cons.

What do you think?
I think that this is the wrong way to look at it. Polytheistic religions are the ones that lead to conflict: you acknowledge that other gods exist, but think that yours is better, so you fight the ones who worship the inferior gods. Monotheism, if properly interpreted, means that all people share a single God and if others believe in another God, they really just mean the same one (for example, according to Judaism, any monotheistic religion is correct for non Jews, because it has to be the same philosophical God as the one the Jews believe in).

Furthermore, religions such as Hinduism and Taoism are also monotheistic at their root: they acknowledge a higher power to which all people and deities belong. This is probably the best (or at least safest) way to interpret monotheism, as it recognizes all humans as believers in the same higher power.

In fact, the problem with religion today is that the Abrahamic monotheism is splitting into faiths that are almost polytheistic. You have American Christians who believe that their God is not the same as Allah or even the Jewish God, and I am sure that you have Muslims that believe the same thing. Any biblical scholar and non-radical priest would obviously see that such claims are absurd both historically and philosophically, but the masses believe in them nonetheless.

Last edited by Ilya : 06-27-2007 at 03:06 PM.
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