In the Eye of the Believer

What is the True Faith? What is the True Religion? What is the True God? Is there a True God? These heady questions were brought up recently in a discussion with an on-line friend.

Every religion & faith claims that it is the True Religion & that its God is the True God. They cite their Bible, Koran, Torah or sacred texts as empirical proof to their claims. They cite the admonitions from their prophets & holy men that to deny their God is a guarantee to damnation.

Each religion has had its share of holy wars to reinforce its beliefs upon the heathens & heretics. Each religion has shown extreme impatience with those who do not follow the word of their God & in response sent those infidels immediately to a meeting with their God.

It is plainly obvious that not all religions can be the True Religion. Either only one is right or they are all wrong. One raised Catholic may make light of or snicker at the Muslim's beliefs. Yet take that same Catholic as an infant & raise it in the Islamic religion & it will be just as fervently Islamic as it is in its Catholic beliefs. Rear a child to believe in reincarnation then rear that same child to believe otherwise & the rationale for each belief can be easily argued by that child.

The problem with believing in ones' religion is that one is required to rely on ancient text which of itself is rooted in oral storytelling, anecdotes & hearsay. Events occurred long before there was a written way to collect & compile them. When the text was indeed compiled, it was compiled by men, men who infused it, edited it & censored it with their own prejudices, interpretations, inaccuracies, contradictions & mistranslations. The final compilation is more "heard of God" than "Word of God".

Each religious text that is derived from such a hodgepodge of story-telling & fact-gathering cannot claim to be the one True Religion, more than any other religion can.

So where does this leave us in the Religibot battles? It leaves us with no clear winner. Each religion has its adherents & believers who have no greater claim to the Divine than any other. It all comes down to ones personal beliefs, whether it is rightly or wrongly held as others may see it.

Perhaps all religions are mere permutations of a one True God. Like playing the game of Telephone, the message distorts the further away from The Source. Or, as a two-dimensional being cannot conceive of or explain a three-dimensional being, so too humans are at a loss to conceive of or explain an Ultimate Being & are thus reduced to explaining such a concept in terms that are understandable to men.

When Pharaoh returned from the Red Sea destruction of his army, he said of Moses, "His god is God." Until the appointed time that such similar revelation occurs to mankind, we can only keep the faith that we hold, claim the beliefs that we believe & respect the beliefs of others.

Religion truly is in the eye of the believer.