how can any one religion make a valid claim to be the fundamental truth?

OK...but I'm not sure that I can. My belief...from my internal mind, or "box" as you call it, is based on the Holy Spirit within me. He stepped into my box and that is why I think as I do. However, even if I imagine that I am a single relative human with no divine revelation, I do not glorify my mind enough to proclaim dogmatic assertions on the idealisms that I have experienced. The problem here is that outside of the so called box, human intellect is god. Its like John Lennons song where imagining no heaven makes everything lovey dovey. Well, this may well be true IF there were no spiritual warfare on the planet...noty just in my "mind/box" but everywhere. You are right, here...it is as if even humans like me who claim to have surrendered to a higher personal absolute then attempt to define the edicts of this absolute and expect others to conform. A curious oddity of human nature. The key is "manufacturers." If a divine cereal were imparted into the cupboards of those who accepted it, no other manmade imitation would suffice. Now...from outside the mind/box of the enlightened ones, there would indeed be no difference. Cereal is cereal, and truth is truth...all truth being relative. True. One needs to taste the product. It all depends on how the Holy Communion is marketed. Yes...IF we respect all opinions or beliefs as equally valid. If you said that your Mother was your Mother and yours alone, no matter what anyone else claimed, you would be right. Absolutely. I could claim that to me, she was my Mother. It would be proven false due to the communion between you and her. Just as Mother is an absolute, so too is God. Unless it has to do with a personal absolute and how YOU suit His tastes.

Firstly ta for the complement.Firstly I need to address the preposterous notion of yours that believing or practicing a religion has anything to do with our continued survival as a species in any kind of evolutionary sense. Evolution doesn’t care what religion we follow. Religion is not a heritable trait, and selection of the fittest is all about heritable traits.In your second paragraph are you trying to make the argument that civilisations have repeatedly taken themselves to the brink of total destruction because they are centred round religious cores , or were saved from their fate because they were centred round religious cores? Anyway why would nature care if we followed a religion or not? I will state again species survival is not dependant on our religious beliefs one way or the other.And using the ECM analogy doesn’t work at all for a religion because as you state it the goal of ECM in regard to radar disruption is to mask the identity of the ‘real’ item to prevent it being detected.As you state, the true item creates a myriad of false items that can easily be taken as the real thing in the hope the aggressor will take the bait and not target the real item. Fine if you are a jet in a hostile environment, but does this work for a religion? Lets see.Would it be typical for a religion to deliberately set up a whole host of compelling alternative religions that are as plausible as the real thing? Would it sit quiet hoping that those seeking truth will choose one of the fake religions instead? This is the behaviour of a church that acts in the manner of ECM as you describe. Not very realistic is it.In turn I suggest this is more likely.Many different religions spring up, some from original sources and some adapting themselves from others. Rather then keeping quiet hoping to be over looked in this target rich environment each religion sits in its own tree shouting it’s virtues and denouncing those of the competition in an attempt to call as many to it as possible, and even better draw away those attracted to the others. Hardly the actions of something trying to divert attention from itself.So no, the ECM analogy truly fails to work in a religious frame work. You are right if one religious view was an fact correct, then it would invalidate most of the others, utterly. But that doesn’t make the rest artificial by default, it just makes them wrong. But first before you get here you have to prove that one religion is in fact the only correct religion. And to date no one had successfully managed to do that. All religions are artificial, made by man to explain the things around him.And why, oh why do religions have to insist on calling other religions the enemy? This attitude is never gonna win hearts and minds.

Firstly I didn’t describe your mind as a box, it was merely a metaphor for pretending you weren’t of a religious frame of thought. To put the religious part of you in a safe but sealed mental space (a box) and keep it safe to come back to with no fear of it being corrupted or lessened in anyway as I know it is truly important to you.I just wanted those who do believe in a god/s to try and imagine the world from an atheist’s point of view that there isn’t any god or gods. To see for just a moment what a farce the ongoing argument between religions is, as to who is right and who has the one true god, when as the Atheist sees it there is no god/s.Outside the embracing arms of religion and a belief in god, mankind has to realise that he is on his own, there is no spiritual crutch, no absolution for sin, no glorious transcendence.In regard to ‘imagine, by J Lennon’ it isn’t just mentally doing away with heaven he sings about it’s pretty much anything that tends to lead man in to strife and hate of his fellow man. The song isn’t saying if we imagine that these things don’t exist then all will be well.It’s a heart felt wish to see the end of Tyranny, poverty, greed, war, hatred and intolerance, to see the end of all traits that set man against man. Its saying wouldn’t it be nice if people lived for the now, for this life and not as something we have to simply get through to get to the next one. Wouldn’t it be nice of we didn’t see division between humans based on where we live or what we believe or the colour of our skin. Wouldn’t it be nice if we all lived utterly selflessly and didn’t succumb to the ugliness of greed, personal gain, bigotry or intolerance. It goes on to say you might well think him nuts for thinking that would be a nice world to live in, but that’s up to you.There have been many pages devoted to the study of this song in many university dissertations so I’m not gonna debate this one further (unless you fancy taking it to another thread?) If you want to claim my mother as your own, take her. Please!Ok seriously in the biological sense ‘mother’ is an absolute. This is easily provable buy genetic comparisons. Either she is my mother or she isn’t. But that’s the only sense it is absolute. Or is it?How do you define mother in regard to surrogacy? When the biological material (egg) is from one woman and another takes the embryo and carries it to term where does the absolute of mother sit then? Biologically it could be argued that the mother is the woman from whom the egg came from. But as the surrogate mother can bond with the child she is carrying and feeding and investing in, in the same way as woman who can conceive and give birth normally does, how does that affect the notion of mother.Now to go yet further if you were to be cloned, taking an egg emptying it out and entering your genetic info into it and activating mitosis, then implanting it into a surrogate woman to carry to term) who is the mother? Your mother? The woman who donated the egg to be used to create the clone? The person who performs the procedure on the donor egg? The woman who carries the clone to term? You? Who knows. Even biologically things can get muddy, so no absolute there.When you start talking about the communion with between Mother and child then you are into areas of emotional or spiritual closeness or of associations and relationships which may or may not be absolute or even provable.For example, in the case of an adopted child is it’s mother the one who gave birth to it or the one who raised it or took it in. Biologically it’s the woman who gave birth to the child but emotionally it could be either.Then we also get in to the realm of step-parents. Can a step parent be a mother to a child she didn’t give birth to?Any biological claim you made to my mother would be shot down because a genetic cross reference would prove if you were physically related or not. But if you had an emotional closeness or relationship with her that compelled you to proclaim her as your mother as well, then you can’t deal with that one as easy. It’s open to subjective thoughts and feelings and a whole host of other factors.You can prove that you are genetically linked to a person or not, but any emotional link becomes highly subjective.Anyway you look at it ‘Mother’ is not an absolute. And even if it was you couldn’t make the same claim for God.I would say you can’t prove the existence of God one way or the other. It would be impossible to prove he exists and even harder to prove he doesn’t. As most religions make a virtue of believing in God with out proof and in some extreme cases a greater virtue in believing in god in the face of strong proof to the contrary, then it’s obvious those who set out the doctrines of these religions were well aware of the problems associated with proving god’s existence and structured their belief systems in such away that lack of proof was not a problem but a strength.If existence for God cant be proved (either way) but only asserted as true based on feeling, belief or dogma, then how can it be an absolute? You may hold the existence of god (which ever one you believe in) as a ‘personal absolute’ but that personal absolute has zero meaning to anyone apart from you. Others may share the same PA, a very similar one, or something way to the right, left or in direct opposition to yours. None of theirs in validate yours, nor does yours in validate theirs.

Okay, dude, take your own advice, only reversed. Push all of your evolution knowledge into a small box and then step away. Between unstartable replication of DNA to the unevolvable flagellum motor on a bacterium, The whole theory finds itself breaking down, starting up again, and then finally colapsing from the inside out.Now, step into that religion box, and imagine that there really is a God, and more importantly for this topic, a devil. Say that you are part of a religion. Any one religion. Now you look around inside that box, and you see all the other religions taking people down to heck. Now remember, only one religion can be right. Say it happens to be yours. So if there is only one true religion, then the others OBVIOUSLY were started and created in the minds of men by the devil, right? I mean God didn't create any religion except for the right one, right? So here's my point. Looking at all religions from a non-religious stand point seems to make them all look contradicting. But if you are a religious person, who believes in God and a devil, it is easy to see why There are so many different religions in the world. But you must try to be a believer to understand this.That's how a religion can make that claim. Being of the LDS, or Mormon religion, I can see this very easily, especially since I know that my church was RESTORED to the earth, rather than being around forever, and leading people away from Christ and his gospel.So that's that, and there you go.

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A Day unto God is thousands of years to man. 6 Godly Days of creation does not undermine the fossil record.
The fossil record, however, clearly undermines evolution. (Any questions should be asked, and every answer will be given)

I see what you are saying - Allah is the one true god.Strange claim from a christian but I guess it takes all sorts.

Welcome to EvC Dude.Please note the forum rules that you have agreed to. One of them is that you are expected to back up any assertions you make. Generally, in the faith and belief area that is relatively easy.I notice that you posted on one of the science threads though. It might be a good idea to seach in the forum and read over a bit before you continue.

LDSdudes poste seems perfectly acceptable to me. He has not advanced any "shoulds", but merely pointed out that from a theistic perspective their model is internally consistent in regards the presenc eof other religions. Which it is.

Hey wassup, and welcome to EvC forum! One interesting point that this forum in general has challenged me to do is to justify my own personal beliefs in God by examining what I believe and not what my church has taught me. It is quite illuminating, and I believe that God has helped me to use the wisdom that He gave me!In the end, it is between each of us individually and God Himself.
IMHO, anyway. Using the old cliche that "Its not about religion. Its about relationship", I would ammend the topic starting title to state "How can any one relationship claim to be the absolute truth?"
The answer is that God Himself makes the claim. Not my Pastor, or yours, or any church or organisation.This message has been edited by Phatboy, 01-18-2005 05:54 AM

I don’t need to pretend to have faith, in the way I asked those who do, to pretend they didn’t, for the simple reason I have been a religious person in my life time and I took it rather seriously. I know what it’s like to know there is but one god and know he is the light and the truth and feel the warmth security and comfort in knowing that. I have been certain that anyone who doesn’t follow the light , the word, the love of god will not be welcomed in to heaven when they die. As I said I don’t need to pretend to be a believer to understand why those of a religious frame of mind are so entrenched in their beliefs, I’ve been there, done it, bought the T-shirt.But belief in something being true does not make it true. Up to a few hundred years ago there was consensus amongst those who believed (and if you didn’t believe you were put in the pillory or worse, much worse) that the world was flat. People earnestly and seriously believed this, it was a fundamental truth. Suggesting otherwise would have got you into serious trouble, and if you combined that with doubting god then your feet would literally not touch the ground, well at least till your arms dropped out of their sockets or they cut them off. What’s the point of this? Well as we know the earth is not flat we know it to be a ball because we can orbit things around it AND we have seen it form a distance. And so we know that the firmly held belief in it being flat was not valid, and thus believing something to be true doesn’t make it so.Yes it’s very easy for a religion to make a claim on being the ONLY true religion , but I asked could any make a VALID claim on being the only true religion. A Subtle but important difference. There is a big difference in claims of truth and proof of truth. And falling on the bible as proof of it’s own claims isn’t valid proof.Ok on to Evolution and science. Just because I claim to be an Atheist doesn’t mean I have to hold Evolution up and a totally flawless answer to everything. As it turns out there are questions that need to be answered in the theory of evolution and that it seem that evolution is far more a complex than we ever thought possible. I don’t think any one with even the slightest notion of how science works would ever claim the theory of evolution to be perfect or un-falsifiable. If you do then you have just created the religion of evolution. Science is not religion. Science believes that the theories and subsequent proofs it put forward are the best fit to describe and explain the world around us, not that they are any kind of incontestable truth. It was thought Newtons’t ideas on gravity would be the be all and end all till it was discovered that although these were good to describe motions on the macro they were useless on the micro.I have not made the claim that my beliefs are the only truth. I freely admit I may be wrong, but I also understand why those of a religious makeup will tend to believe the dogmatic claims of their faith to be the only true religion.And finally if it’s so obvious that ALL other religions are man made, does that not cast the slightest bit of doubt in your mind that your religion might also be man made? What if one of the others is the one true religion and despite your best efforts you are the one who has been taken in by the devil, for he is a trixy beast. To quote Granny Weatherwax.. Things that try to look like things often look more like things than things! Stands to reason. As you say the false religions have been inspired by the devil to ensnare the un wary, surely he would create these false religions to be as convincing as possible, to be as plausible as possible, if you were following one of these false religion you would not know it because the devil would be telling you that this was the one true religion the single truth, and them over there have Oh so wrong.So how can you be sure you are not following one of these false religions? How can you be 100% sure you have not been duped by the devil into believing a false religion. If the Devil is so good at deceiving people and so good at creating inspiring religions to trap the un-wary, If it is so obvious that ALL the other religions are the inspired work of the Morning Star, in all his devilment isn’t it remarkably lucky you were born into the only true religion and not one of these fakes that look taste feel and act exactly like the real one?

but what if god doesnt exist? or is not the god you think he is?This message has been edited by ohnhai, 01-18-2005 09:36 AM

Isn't that true of all GODs?

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Aslan is not a Tame Lion

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The answer is that God Himself makes the claim.

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Where you there at the time?

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How is it the same?

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Have you inspected and compared the interpretations both churches rendered to suit their need?

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"Truth is in the eye of the beholder", isn't it?

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One of the ways he talks is in a small still voice. Usually it is the first thought that enters your mind after asking a question.

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Uh, that's me talking to myself.

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If they are all reflections of the ultimate genuine truth, then the truth itself impossible to describe or understand.

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Does that mean that we should just stop looking then? Hell no. The journey is more important than the destination. People spend their whole lives reaching out to find the ultimate truth without ever finding it; and even if they do, they might not understand it. But someone else might - and because we are all different, there are many, many different ways to make the journey - hence many different religions. Claiming that only one path is the right one is a bit arrogant.

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I believe that if option 3 is in fact the correct option, then the genuine truth that they all reflect is that there is no truth at all. That's fine but it does not explain the deep hunger that humans have for truth if it in fact it doesn't exist. That's illogical.

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That's a very pessimistic opinion. I prefer to believe that if there is an ultimate truth, there's at least 6.2 billion different ways to find it.

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So even if no one religion has ever quite gotton it just right, they're not even emulating from the same source document.

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Who cares? Do you really think a book is going to tell you the truth? Or that a book written by someone else will tell you how you can find the truth? No one ever said that getting to the ultimate truth was going to be easy. Looking for some package deal, like one religion that has it all, is just silly.What if your religion is the wrong one?Option 3 is a viable alternative even if you hold the opinion to the contrary. You have not shown that it is not, so far.The Rockhound (btw sorry about the late reply)