I said all major religions are basically good, I did not say they were all 100% right. The central premise of religions
(leading a moral life pleases god) is not contradictory but the details can be contradictory.
Then we seem to disagree about what the central premise of the major religions is, which is, of course fine.
If we take Christianity, for instance, I find that the central premise is a belief in the Christian god and that Jesus was his son.
As far as I see it everything about the religion falls apart if this central premise is not, in fact, true, which is the crux (no pun intended) of my argument.
I'll deal with your argument about the 'goodness' of religion below.
They don't have to agree 100% to be basically good. I am Advaitan (non-dual hinduism) and personally believe that to be
the most correct. However, the God concept is impossible for us to fully wrap our minds around and teachers have tried to
present it in different ways to people of different educational levels and cultures.
Oh, how I loathe these 'god moves in mysterious ways' arguments...
To me stating that something is impossible to understand is a cop-out of such magnitudes that I can barely express it.
BTW, the pantheistic label on
hinduism was originally placed by early christian researchers who didn't grasp Indian concepts. From the hindu scriptures
'the thousand gods are just my thousand faces'.
Fair enough.
I merely used it as an example of concepts that are mutually exclusive, of which there are many.
If you want I can easily find others.
I argue it's not black/white at all, but deep and difficult.
Well, a statement or an explanation is either correct, or it is not.
I don't see how it can be any other way.
Of course, an explanation can be partially correct, but then it is of vital importance to determine which parts are correct and not.
I have vaguely heard of Odin and no nothing about him. Mankind has gone from the ape stage to the internet age in many
small steps and missteps. Many tribes/groups through that evolution had their isolated beliefs about supernatural things
and many sound absurd to us today.
Just about all religious and supernatural beliefs, present and former, sound absurd to me, but that is a different discussion.
The Odin's of the past largely died out on the evolutionary struggle of man's growing intelligence and have been almost totally replaced by the major religions of the modern world.
Usually they were replaced by the religions that are now the major religions of the world, and generally not through the use of intelligent discourse.
I believe reincarnation is real. Any teaching that does not include this I don't feel is 100% correct. A religion can be wrong on some points and still be basically good.
False beliefs are never good in my opinion, but even if they were, I would still prefer to face reality as it is, rather than as I'd want it to be.
Wrong because not everyone agrees what the term 'the son of a god' actually means. I personally don't use the term in describing Jesus. Christian religions that do can still be basically good.
Well, according to the Bible the term is rather specific.
And that chain of events either took place, or they did not.
'Good' in this sense is basically encouraging its followers to follow a moral life and to 'do unto others as you would
have them do unto you'. Religions great step forward came when they moved past the idea of sacrificing to and appeasing
gods to the concept of a god pleased by good moral behavior. There's still a lot of evolution needed though in my
opinion.
The Golden Rule does not have religious origins and humans do not need religion to be 'good', whatever we decide that term should mean.
Morals are also subjective and change from society to society and also over time, which means that while I might be considered a 'good' person in Norway of today, I probably would not have been considered a 'good' person a couple of hundred years ago, or in a different society.
And yet, all of this is irrelevant to the point I was making.
Whether a belief is good in the sense that it encourages people to be moral still has no impact on whether the belief itself is true and correct.
And currently there is no reason to think that any sort of supernatural entities exist or that the religious beliefs connected to them carry any sort of validity.
