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

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In the end which one you take off the shelf has more to do with how it suits your tastes rather than an accurate claim to be the one true religion.

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Excellent topic ohnhai and your method of defining it is impressive. The perspective of one on the sideline or as a hesitant consumer is interesting.If in this world of yours there is no god, then it would seem that a disproportionate amount of human energy is spent on it as frivoulous nonsence. But human civilization has survived all of it's attempts to exterminate itself over the thousands of years and every civilization seems to have at it's core, some type of religion. Even if it's Communision which places man as the god. So either nature is about to wipe it's face of the snot called humans because the creature is defective in it's priority to use energy on theology verses energy on survival and species perpetuation, or the whole reason to exist is because of the existance of one true religion. (And the struggle to find or hide this truth from the inhabitants).In military aviation, one of the biggest problems in operating over a battle front in the air, is being shot down by a surface to air missile. The most deadly are the radar guided missiles because they have an outside intellegence feeding them directions to the target, verses heat seeking which for the most part hone in on the hottest object within it's targeted field of view. (Some of the newer heat seeking missiles are able to choose between true and artificial targets though). The objective for the aircraft is to survive over the battle field long enough to accomplish your mission and then exit the theater of operation and return safetly to base.For a heat seeking missile to be fooled, the aircraft targeted simply fires off a few flares and since the point source of heat from the flare is 7 times more intence then the exhaust of the aircraft, the missile locks onto the flare and destroys it - the plane survives.However, the radar guided CW (continuos wave) type missiles require more thought. Basically, as the search radar locks onto a target with it's pulsed energy, it sees the radar return on the view scope. The target is designated and the missile is fired. The ground radar sends tracking data to the flying missile and guides the missile to the target. Target destroyed. How do you defeat this? We do it by sampling the signature of the transmitted radar signal and then mimicking it as a radar target return, complete with all the dynamic bells and whistles. So when we are hit with a search radar, a natural radar return signal off of the skin of our aircraft occurs which is the genuine return, and WE purposefully create false targets with our own electronics. So the view on the radar scope is not just one genuine target but hundreds of targets, all equally accurate from the viewer's eye. The targets all appear genuine, but move in different directions, at different speeds. So which one do you tell the missile to go after? Welcome to the world of Electronic Counter Measures or ECM.Now why would there be so many religions, each seemingly the right one yet each moving in different directions and at different speeds, if 1) all humans evolved from the same parent human as evolution suggests, or 2) there is only one correct religion.Well, from an evolutionary perspective, the whole concept of religion is a waste of energy and resources and will probably result in the extermination or at least the stymying of the species.However, if religion is true and valid, they all can't be correct. They can be similiar but only one is the correct genuine truth and the other's are artificial. Why would there be artificial religions? Why are there artificial radar targets. The targets are purposefully generated by an outside intellegence to protect the genuine target from distruction. The artificial religions are purposefully generated by an outside intellegence to promote distruction. And it is an effective form of spiritual warfare in it's battlefield just as Electronic Warfare works well over it's battlefield.In battle there is a goal and an objective. In spiritual warfare there is also a goal and an objective. So what you need to do is to determine what the goal and objective is in spiritual warfare so as to better understand the enemy your are facing. Once you get a good understanding of the enemy, you can access their capabilites and that gives you an idea as to what they are trying to hide, similiar to in ECM we try to hide the genuine radar return by flooding the scope with many false targets. The odds of hitting the correct target with one missile amoung hundreds of seemingly valid targets is slight. That promotes survival.The view screen of truth is also flooded with hundreds of religions. What are the odds of hitting the right one the first time with just one life? (I will say that an individual made the statement long ago that "narrow is the path to eternal life and few find it").Not good unless you take the time to discover and then understand the enemy. Once you get to know more about the enemy, you can better find what it is that the enemy is trying to hide. What you eventually find just like in ECM, is all of the false targets are in fact similiar to each other and discernable from the one genuine target. It takes an immense amount of processing of the available data to come to that conclusion and hit the right one.So too, in discovering what the true religion is, if you should ever make if past the stage of viewing religion beyond an evolutionary anomily.

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3) Added option - All religions are reflections of that genuine truth, and no one religion has ever quite gotten it.

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Listen to a piece of symphony music composed by any one of your favorite composers. The piece as a whole moves together even though different instruments play different parts. Even if you go to a symphony and listen to the warm up practicing before the start, it gells as all of the instruments play independent and the musicians practice whatever warm-up excercise they choose. It all flows together as if each piece is a part or a shade of the grand picture.Now blow a ships airhorn. Have Billy Idol scream "WITH A REBEL YELLLLLLL!!!", light some firecrackers, sound a siren, turn on a circular saw. That's more of what you have with the world religions of today. So even if no one religion has ever quite gotton it just right, they're not even emulating from the same source document.If they are all reflections of the ultimate genuine truth, then the truth itself impossible to describe or understand. 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.I hunger for food when I'm famished. I thirst for water when dehydrated. I long for truth because it is also a void that needs filled. But since I don't have a void for foylabula, I don't hunger or desire foylabula. I don't have a hunger for foylabula because foylabula doesn't exist. I have a hunger for truth because it does exist. So it's either option 1 which means humans are a defective byproduct of evolution and we will exterminate ourselves as we fight over nothingness but call it religion. Or option 2 in which there is one truth and hundreds of decoys.This message has been edited by Lizard Breath, 01-17-2005 13:20 AM

The ECM analology works rather well if you understand the enemy that you are dealing with. Without an understanding of the enemy or as in your case, the failure to recognise one, then of course the analogy doesn't fit. In my post I always compared the ECM method to a spiritual warfare. If you are to understand what I am saying instead of just disagreeing with it because it doesn't fit your model, you need to first examine the response from the perspective that there is a battle field in play.Since there is a battlefield, then there is a battle. A battle means that a conflict is occuring. A conflict results from two or more different opponents desiring the same thing, or one of the oppenents wanting control over the other, or something the other has.Look at it from that perspective and then read my post again and you will see that from a spiritual battle perspective, there is something to be gained and something to be lost and the key to the batle is in the discovery of the truth. So one of the oppenents needs to find the truth, the other knows the truth but needs to hide it and the best ways are1) Camoflage - creating the illusion that there is no conflict2) Deception - changing the apperant reason for the conflict or masking the objective of winning it3) Deflection - hiding the nessessary information amoung a host of counterfit oracles of information, making it's discovery minimal in impact and diluting it's potencey via over promotion.

If so, he didn't bother to portray himself very well. I would think that if Satan did in fact write the Bible that he would have portrayed himself as the victor and not the vanquished as it appears does happen. To portray yourself as the enemy, if you actually are the enemy means that you are at war with yourself if your goal os to disguise yourself.Anyone at war with themself does not make a very formidable opponent. Satan is implied as being according extrodinarily powerful according to the Bible. Powerful but vanquished ultimately. Interesting concept though as to what kind of truth could be hidden by writing a holy book about yourself as the loser in hopes of hiding the truth.

Then I would expect a book like that to be written as a whole work transmitted through one person instead of writting it as 66 books by at least 40 authors and taking 2000 years of time to do it and encompassing far more time then that.I would expect a work by Satan that decieved in the manner you say would be more along the lines of how the Book of Mormon or the Quran was created by one person. Those books flowed from a god solely through one person and that one person became the singular point source of information about the god.It would be far easier to relay a consistant message if the message was a lie, if it was transmitted through just one person verses transmitting something consistant through over 40 authors from all walks of life and all types of vocations and economic levels.

I would say that he is far more powerful than most on the Earth would ever be willing to recognise. But within that power comes a realization that his end is set. Therefore, his scale of economy would be one of volume instead of quality. So even though he is capable of creating a litterary work over 2000 years using many authors, if it is a lie then quantity becomes a quality all it's own.Each holy book gives rise to a whole religion and masses of followers. Having to choose amoung many books and religions verses one book, being the Bible - or no book, and the truth of God could only be revealed through the examination of the creation doesn't make good military sense.If I want to survive, I don't create a tank, make you think I'm in the tank, but then attack your fortress on foot with a pocket knife. I create many fake tanks and while you are trying to pick the right one, I attack in the genuine tank.In this case, Satan is in the fortress, trying to not be attacked by the real tank. He's hoping that you spend all of your time chasing after fake tanks and never find the real one and learn to ooperate it before time runs out. This is a way over simplistic model of what the Bible describes as spiritual warfare and as such the model breaks down before you even get to the margins.

If the truth about the Creator could only be found through the examination of the creation through science, then I could decieve with a lie about the creation via another communication other than science. If my intent was to hide the truth, I would create the concept of a holy book and try to make the people of the Earth believe that the creator has an intimate purpose for certain creatures in the creation. I would try to say that the Creator holds certain creatures in the creation accountable for their actions via an afterlife judgement.Then I would say that this creator was so loving that he assumed the form of the creature in the creation while still remaining the creator so he could bridge the gap and pay the price of accoutability for the creatures himself, just to make the creatures in the creation even more priceless to him. Meanwhile, the real Creator sits by idle and hopes that the truth of the Creator and the Creation become known to all through scientific discovery. And this science and discovery merely convienes that even if there was a creator to start the whole process, there is nothing in it for the creation exept to be recycled at the big crunch. So what's the point of decieving by Satan? There's no objective as in the type of spiritual warefare that the Bible speaks of.That doesn't make sense which is why having the Bible written by Satan is an interesting concept but it lacks logic from even Satan's perspective.If I were Satan, I'd try to destroy it, eradicate it, copy it with esential alterations, add to it, mimmick it, flood the market with many variations of it, re-invent it or discredit it. But to author it as it is would be insane even for Satan.

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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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I agree that since each person on the planet is uniquely different ( I think genetically we are something like .002%different as far as DNA code from each other), then each person is going to have a different story about how they found their truth about the meaning of life.Religions attempt to deal with ultimate truths. There are not 6.2 billion versions of it. Only one version. 6.2 billion stories on how to get there, but only one truth. So if any religion is the true one, then it must be illuminated by that truth as a faith. You can take some religions and throw them out imediatly because they loose credibility when some of it's text is proved false. I believe one religion states that the Earth is held up on the backs of four giant elephants standing on a huge turtle. Well, the Mercury missions of the 60's put an end to that notion.Evolution stated that humans were from 5 species, with the Aboriginees at the bottom end of the developmental scale and Europeans at the top. Well, the Human Genome Project put and end to that notion.The Mormons called people of dark skin color part of the curse of Cain or some other Bible character but science has since determined that we all have the same potential at birth for very dark skin but our DNA determines how much of the two forms of melanin are produced, so that puts an end to that notion.From my endeavors, the only source document that hasn't been tripped up when it comes to explanations abut the natural world has been the Bible, so I've looked at what it has to say about religious truth. What it says is that there is a spiritual realm that is outside of our own 4 dimensional world, but it's activities dirrectly affect our situations.This makes logical sense to me, a military mind, because it explains why so many humans could come from one source pair, share all the same genetic code as the source pair, but have such radically different perceptions about the truth. There is an outside source that is steering people in many dirrections, acting like a deflection plate.Some are deflected way off into the twilight zone, others are just barely grazed, but in the economy of ultimate truth, according to the Bible, if you miss by a micron or a country mile, it's still scored a miss. Close only works in horse shoes, hand gernades and strategic nuclear exchange.

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The Rockhound (btw sorry about the late reply)

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That's cool by me. I am the worst abuser in this forum about posting and then being gone for days before I can get back and reply. They have a new smart filter being used by the government which filters out anything that has a religious taste. So replying while out in the field is impossible even though at times I have plenty of spare hours to do so. Actually, they're getting carried away with the filter because it's getting to the point where anything with an http address is filtered out!This message has been edited by Lizard Breath, 01-23-2005 07:38 AM

Evolution first posted that humans were 5 different species of organisms. As more information became available, evolution was tweeked to reflect the new data.The Bible has not had that luxury but hasn't needed it. It states that all humans were originally from one breeding pair. It would appear that with all of the human science over thousands of years, evolution as a truth got it wrong about the human species, but the Bible was right, then the Author of the Bible knows more about how we all got here then the author of evolution.

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Christianity has always considered non-Christians as savages and beneath contempt.

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I'll agree that a tremoundous amount of wrongs in the world have been committed under the banner of Christianity. But to say that Christians have always considered non-Christians as savages is totally false and shows much bias and little fact. I would suggest that you look at some of the Christian efforts just to bring some comfort to those who suffered from the Tsunami and then say weather Christians see them as savages beaneth contempt or as unfortunate victims.It is better to draw a bead on Christianity from the perspective of it's role model who is Jesus, not from all of the people who have boasted to be Christians. Every human who I have ever known has faults and has let me down in one form or another, proving their own falibility as a human. It is therefore consistant that many wrongs will be commited under the banner of Christianity just as much as they were commited under the doctrine of evolution by Communists and even the Nazi's.If you can link the horrible behavior of the boasting Christians over the centuries back to it's founder, Jesus then you should be able to observe similiar behavior in him either by word or deed. I observe though, that it is just another example of humans doing whatever they please to serve a personal interest but cover it or justify it under the banner of God's will. I'll probably see it even in church later on this morning.

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That even continues today. We had posts right here recently from Christians related to the Tsunami saying that it was more important to save souls than to feed, cloth or succor.

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You again are partially true with this. Biblically, it says that even if you could aquire every possible possesion on this planet, it would be of absolutely no value compared to the value of your soul. But again, if you look at the behavior of the founder of Christianity, he is documented as spending a great deal of time feeding people, healing them and reaching out to them. Even when a man came to him to be healed on the Sabath, he showed the priority of the physical need. He did not say "In six days the Lord created the heavens and the Earth, and on the seventh day he rested. Come back therefore tomorrow and the Lord will heal you". No, what he said was "Stretch out your hand".If you want to use humans who boast about their religious affiliations as examples of that religions precepts, you will find that they will always let you down and dissapoint or worse. It is more accurate to look to the writings of the religion itself to see if their behavior is consistant, not the other way around.

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That's both a dodge and a shift - you clearly linked this concept with work in the HGP. So I'll ask again - was it the HGP that caused this idea to be dropped? or did this happen previously?

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It is neither. It's just you trying to find a crack or split in my line or argument and then once created, or in this case perceived, then you'll try to expound on it. Your point is obvious but it is unimportant pertaining to this line of debate.If there was in anyone's mind the notion that humans are different species as reflected by the racial differences that WE perceive, then the HGP put an end to that notion. Anyone who would still believe that there is a curse of Cain or four to five origins for humans is now just perpetuating racism.If in our culture we made the perception of ear lobe size being the most discerning factor of a human, then we would have racism based on ear lobe size. But because humans are programmed to que in on is skin color first, then it becomes the factor for racism. Both factors are of equally little consequence in seperating humans into various species but evolution originally employed one of them for this.