How do you refute such claims?
Religions decay over time.
Every (real) religion was originally based on a person’s (or people’s) direct experience with the Divine. But over time, that direct perception of Truth gets clouded.
Imagine if thousands of years ago, someone saw the sun, and explained his experience to a country in which every person is born blind. And every generation, they pass down the tales they heard about the sun from their ancestors, all originating in that one person who could see. Even though the person at the beginning really did see the sun, the people hearing those tales of the sun thousands of years later will necessarily understand less than the people who heard it directly from the person who could actually see.
And that would happen
even if the stories were passed down perfectly. In practice, they are not. Things like politics get intermingled with religion. Stories or their interpretations are changed in order to achieve worldly ends. Cultural context is lost. People draw false conclusions from the stories because they have no experience of the reality they portray for themselves. Thus, Jesus said:
And if the blind lead the blind, both shall fall into the ditch. – Matthew 15:14
Thus, periodically, someone who can actually
see has to come along and resuscitate the religion, to put people back on the right track. Sometimes, when those people come along, it results in a “new” religion, but the new religion is really just the old religion, brought back to life.
Jesus did that for Judaism. The Jewish religion was arguably “dead” by the time Jesus came along, because hardly anyone was entering the Kingdom of God through that religion. As He said:
But woe unto you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! for ye shut up the kingdom of heaven against men: for ye neither go in yourselves, neither suffer ye them that are entering to go in. – Matthew 23:13
So the leaders of Jewish religion at the time were
not only failing to enter the Kingdom themselves, but were also preventing others from entering. So the religion was ineffective. Jesus fixed that.
Thus, there is a benefit to having a religion that has more recently been revitalized. But that does
not mean you should follow any new age malarkey. Whenever a true prophet comes along, they always teach the same thing the ones before them taught. Thus, Jesus said:
Think not that I am come to destroy the law, or the prophets: I am not come to destroy, but to fulfil. For verily I say unto you, Till heaven and earth pass, one jot or one tittle shall in no wise pass from the law, till all be fulfilled. – Matthew 5:17-18
and
Jesus answered and said unto him, Art thou a master of Israel, and knowest not these things? [meaning, the method of salvation Jesus was explaining in this discussion was already present in the Jewish teachings, and should have been known to someone like Nicodemus, who was one of the religious leaders] – John 3:10
Therefore, agreeing with what came “first,” as you put it, is important, but alone is not sufficient. It is also important to have proximity to the Divine.
