The criteria of love is a good place to start, but it’s not the only criteria because it alone creates an unbalanced and untrue picture of God and the nature of man. I believe, if I may speak for Charlemagne III, that he simply wished to point in a particular direction, not make love the end-all and be-all of anyone’s search for sound religion.
Very good point. The writing that they did was often on very fragile substances and only portions survived; if anything at all.Well, it certainly would have made the city easier to conquer
Actually, so little is known about ancient times that definitive claims like “impossible” are a stretch. It means essentially, “Impossible given what minuscule knowledge we pretend we have.”
I think it’s pretty clear that “grant” in this sense means “admit” and “believe.” People certainly do have the authority to decide what they believe. For example, Protestant Christians reject the belief that Jesus established the Pope as an infallible authority. Catholics, on the other hand, have decided that Jesus’ words indicate their leader can make infallible pronouncements. Each group will claim that it’s decision was made with proper authority while the other group was somehow invalid or mistaken.
Who cares? My point was that even if we accepted Charlemagne III’s proposal and an interpretation of history where Jesus was divine, we still can’t narrow the set of religions down to Christianity alone. Both the Baha’i and Christian faiths are compatible with those two propositions (in fact, there are likely others.)
Suppose you are a Sumerian living in Sumer c. 3500BC. You are trying to decide which religion is the correct one. You use your above line of reasoning to conclude that the local theocracies claim to divine inspiration must be valid. After all, you’ve never heard any “legitimate” competing claims and God certainly must reveal himself. Unfortunately for you, the Israelites will not come into existence for another 2000 years. There would be no way for you to anticipate or be convinced by God’s revelation to the Israelites. You therefore happily conclude that your native religion must be true.
The crux of the issue of revelation. One person’s revelation is another’s insanity.
Yes, I was offering a short cut to finding the Way. You have to start somewhere, and most people recognize a God of love long before they recognize a God of truth. And let’s be frank, some people are a whole lot more interested in love than they are in truth.
This doesn’t follow. It is not on the basis of purely external “information” that I am convinced that my ‘native’ religion must be true. I could then, as I do now, have taken a non-historical, and not necessarily experiential perspective on truth.
To begin with, Catholics care. If Catholics once believed their religion was in error on any one point, it could then be in error on a hundred or a thousand points of doctrine. Protestants don’t much care about infallibility, and so they have broken into thousands of sects each declaring the other in error and all declaring the Catholic Church in error. If you are not a Christian, and you are seriously thinking about becoming one, it would have been so much easier to have one choice than to have to plough through a thousand sects.
The Bahá’í Faith originated in Islam, just as the Unitarian/Universalist Church originated in Christianity. They have parallels in their history, both being of relatively recent origin, and both espousing the validity of all religions and all gods as their preferred outlook.
It seems to me that you’re mischaracterizing their beliefs. They seem to me to be saying that all religions have their origins with God, and that God has a plan for all religions. All the religions, therefore, should contribute to our continually improving understanding of God. For example, Christianity is quick to point out that the savagery that God commanded of the Israelites is not indicative of the savagery of Christianity as a whole.
In the same way, the Bahá’í faith believes that God had a purpose for even the “barely civilized” religions that caused people to put entire cities to the sword. They argue that what God directed such savage people to do is not a sort of universal commandment, simply something they could understand that would further Gods long term plans.
If that is so, is there a Bible of their religion that claims to be divinely inspired, or is this, like Buddhism, a man-made religion, claiming divine inspiration but able to point to no other authority than the man who started it?
