Is Christianity/Catholicism any more true than other religions?

[salival]

Well, that is the problem. How do you know which one is THE key or even if any of the keys opens the door? What is none of the keys open the door? What if the door has multiple handles and each key opens one of them? Or maybe what if the handle can be opened with ANY of the keys?

uncleauberon:

To paraphrase and reinterpret some G.K. Chesterton sayings :

All religions are equal as race horses are equal. But, only one wins the race.

All Creeds are equal as all keys are equal. But, only one will open the door.

God Bless

todd

 

[salival]

Yes, but this are claims from The Bible, how can we justify that The Bible is not making similar claims to the one of the dying/ressurection gods?

Verbum:

Hi Salival,

the upper hand to Catholicism by focusing everything on Christ. Why should this be so?

Christ claimed to be God and he said that he would die and resurrect on the third day. He did both. So He is God, and we must listen to Him.

Verbum

 

[Heliotrope]

Salival,

First off, I hail a fellow Tool fan. Tool was with me guiding me through my atheism, and it wasn’t long after my return to Catholicism that they put out their album Lateralus, which is actually a very worshipful album with a great deal of Pentecost and Pilgrim’s Progress imagery. To contribute to this thread: many of the apostles died from torture without recanting their testimony about encountering Jesus after he’d died. Now, many can, under torture, maintain a stance they believe to be true, whether it actually is true or not. But human beings aren’t designed to insist on what they know they’ve fabricated while subjected to Roman-level torture. These executions were often very public affairs, and the majority of witnesses to the execution were non-Christian and part of the mainstream ideology of the day–they had every possible motivation and chance to thwart any false reports that, e.g., Peter didn’t recant–so many disciples/apostles died without recanting, in front of hostile crowds. The emphasis in Christianity on martyrdom is due to this understandable hostility against such an improbable truth–God has a Son, or what we can most fully understand as a Son, and this Son lived a life as a human.
I found it easy to believe, as an intellectual and an oddball, that however I found God, I wouldn’t need that experience of God to be anthropomorphic. However, I’ve since come very close to the mental experience of death, and I can assure you, I wanted not just a bright light or world of marvels to appear, but a human being. I wanted a hand to hold. I don’t believe this is particular to me; I think that as we have all been children, we all contain, on those inner layers of the onion soul, a child nature, which child nature quite rightly wants a God that is neither impersonal (like a rock or a force) nor suprapersonal (like a superhuman being) but personal–someone who can hug you with human hands. To say that anyone is ready to part from their personal nature, and thus God’s personal nature, before they’ve died, makes as much sense as saying that an apple still on the tree is ready to rot into the soil and nourish a new apple seedling. I’m now humbler, and find Jesus much sweeter than my previous conceptions of God.
continued…

 

[Heliotrope]

I still visit other religions, especially Gnosticism, Judaism, Buddhism, in order to deepen or broaden my faith as God allows. I’ve found these to be, so far, the toxic parts of the other religions that push me back toward Christianity:

Judiasm seems to me to be a first covenant with a specific people on earth in order to ensure their survival as a race–all of the laws either ensure that people’s physical survival on mortal earth, or ensure that the people stay connected to God in order to immediately obey any further instructions from God necessary to ensure their survival–thus God’s insistence on testing Abraham’s obedience by asking him to destroy the very thing, Isaac, that he believed was his reward for obedience. Many Jews do not believe in or think much of an afterlife, and this is because their faith is not centered on that aspect of God’s plan.

Buddhism, simply, is based on a belief that Creation had no beginning and has no end and has no shape through time–it’s non-evolutionary, and offers only the hope, not the guarantee, that Creation evolves–grows, complicates, harmonizes, etc. Thus the nauseating cyclical nature of their conception of Creation, and thus their desire to exit existence.

Gnosticism makes it impossible for people born with mental difficulties to enter heaven, which is insanely unfair.

Zoroastrianism and the Yin-Yang posit equal amounts of Good and Evil in the world, which means that, overall, Creation is not Good… not acceptable at either an intellectual or an emotional level… karma without forgiveness promises a world in which, if at any point 1 million murders were happening, an equal amount of evil will be happening at every subsequent point in Creation, to infinity. This is, again, to me, nauseating and intolerable.

Satanism misunderstands individuality by supposing that community and symbiosis diminish the individual–by supposing that the self is a possession we can only keep by holding onto, when in fact, the self is the one possession we keep by de-focusing on it.

 

[Ahimsa]

uncleauberon:

To paraphrase and reinterpret some G.K. Chesterton sayings :

All religions are equal as race horses are equal. But, only one wins the race.

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But if I love my horse, I’m sticking with him, win or lose, rain or shine, life or death.