"There are 4,200 religions in the world with 320 million gods to believe in. What makes you think Christianity is the ONLY true one?"

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History is full of men who have claimed that they came from God, or that they were gods, or that they bore messages from God — Buddha, Mohammed, Confucius, Christ, Lao-tze, and thousands of others, right down to the person who founded a new religion this very day. Each of them has a right to be heard and considered. But as a yardstick external to and outside of whatever is to be measured is needed, so there must be some permanent tests available to all men, all civilizations, and all ages, by which they can decide whether any one of these claimants, or all of them, are justified in their claims…

…To each claimant reason says, “What record was there before you were born that you were coming?” With this test one can evaluate the claimants. (And at this preliminary stage, Christ is no greater than the others.) Socrates had no one to foretell his birth. Buddha had no one to pre-announce him and his message or tell the day when he would sit under the tree. Confucius did not have the name of his mother and his birthplace recorded, nor were they given to men centuries before he arrived so that when he did come, men would know he was a messenger from God.

But, with Christ it was different. Because of the Old Testament prophecies, His coming was not unexpected. There were no predictions about Buddha, Confucius, Lao-tze, Mohammed, or anyone else; but there were predictions about Christ. Others just came and said, “Here I am, believe me.” They were, therefore, only men among men and not the Divine in the human.

Christ alone stepped out of that line saying, “Search the writings of the Jewish people and the related history of the Babylonians, Persians, Greeks, and Romans.”

—Archbishop Fulton J. Sheen

The Only Person Ever Pre-Announced
 
and the odds of so many prophecies being fulfilled in one person is astronomical.

Then we have the Resurrection…
 
"I believe in Christianity as I believe that the Sun has risen; not only because I see it but because by it I see everything else.” - C.S. Lewis
 
A couple of thoughts:

The profusion of religion suggests to me something. There is something we are striving for, looking to find. But we don’t really seem to know how to find it. Somewhere, something went wrong.

Most every religion agrees that there’s something wrong. There’s some sort of gap between the way people are, and the way they should be. And we need something more than just trying to be good to get there.

Now, Christianity has an explanation for these things. It tells us where things went wrong, and it has a superhuman intervention to make them right again. But it also tells us that we were built to know God, and that’s why we reach out, however imperfectly.
 
AlNg said:
I doubt there are 330 million gods. .
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We are all created by the same God; and the same God hears all our prayers, despite all the different gods we pray to. You will never look into the eyes of anyone who does not matter to God.
 
because I trust the saints and martyrs, I trust how much some of them suffered for their faith.
 
Know them by their fruits. Catholicism is the best way of life! and it sure helps you spend eternity in a good place.
 
Eric_Hyom said:
We are all created by the same God; and the same God hears all our prayers, despite all the different gods we pray to. You will never look into the eyes of anyone who does not matter to God.
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That wasn’t the question, though, was it? It wasn’t “does God hear our prayers?”, but rather, “if people pray to 320 million ‘gods’, which is the objectively correct belief?” 😉
 
Either all the Gods are selfsame, or they are not. If they are not by definition there is one who is the greatest.
 
And you won’t if you believe that. In fact if one rejects the Word, then there remains as many potential religions as there are people, each with it’s own rejections and acceptance, and a mish mash of the occult and astronomical mumbo jumbo, and oh yes, with a sprinkling of beliefs geared to what a man’s habits deems acceptable behavior to him, this imminent material man. With one person we have a belief that marriage is simply an earthly contract, so he believes it was perfectly right to have divorced 5 times. This behavior of course parallels with the religious principles of a neighbor who believes that the affairs he had with 5 married women is perfectly moral.

But then 2000 years ago a man and God set us straight, and so now the human race is accountable for his behavior and will pay for all his actions. He left with some good news that if people hold to the principles of his new Religion, then he follows a road map of life that will never fail or let him down.

This new religion was a painful one to accept for some." Where are all the freedoms and acceptable behavior patterns of my religion, the MYReligion.? This is a religion hard to accept. I prefer the wide road" they say. So they live for a short time, then those not blessed with sanctifying graces that could have been obtained by changing, die for eternity completely aware of the current reality they are in.

So we have a world where the adopted patterns and principles of life HAVE COME to be their religion, since that life is godlike, providing the principles and freedoms and comforts that are self serving. Some say they believe nothing, but their daily life paints a pattern of serving a god of this world, the love of comforts, the minding of one’s own business,the money and money building, the hours of wasted spare time clicking remotes, when a charity needs volunteers. Their god demands to be obeyed, and he obeys with relish, in fact blinded by it.

He lives a religion in defiance of the will of a God, unless he wakes up and submits to the True Religion.
 
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Almost all of those gods (if the number is even correct) are of a completely different nature than the God we propose. They tend to be created things, things with contingent essences, that either exist or don’t–but are not given the nature of the first principle of all being on which all else is contingent. That is who God is–that one being where essence and existence are the same. That allows us to rule out all religions that are polytheistic or which worship idols. It makes no sense to give supreme honor to the Creator and First Principle (what religion is) to things that, with a contingent essence, are not different than us.

Some of those other religions are not even really religions properly so called, as they have nothing to do with the divine or the Creator (certain Eastern “religions” come to mind)

Now it is just a matter of whether God has revealed Himself or provided any revelation to man, and where that is. Compared to other claimants where, say, one man alone in a cave claimed God gave him that revelation and then he used it to achieve political power by spreading his new religion by force, the many who witnessed Christ’s miracles, resurrection, and received revelation from God and then suffered and died for it as a result are much more believable. And they did not convert others by the sword, but as a persecuted sect of a persecuted religion, they converted the most powerful empire in the world based solely on the credibility of their testimony.

Once we have established Christianity as the most credible, Catholicism is the most credible claimant to that revelation (there are many threads on this forum about this).
 
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I believe because of fulfilled prophecy.

I believe because of the Prophet Isaiah, who predicted that the Persian monarch Cyrus the Great would rebuild Jerusalem (Isaiah 44:24–28). This was a particularly impressive prophecy, because God called Cyrus by name more than a century before the king-to-be was even born.

I believe because of Messianic prophecy. Here’s a site which lists 44 prophecies of the Messiah in the Hebrew Scriptures with their fulfillment in the New. 47 Old Testament Prophecies About Jesus

I believe because of Israel. Many of the peoples listed in the Old Testament no longer exist today as a cohesive united people. And yet the people whom God chose and described in Deuteronomy 7:6-8 as 'The least of all peoples" still survives today.

On May 14th 1948 Israel became a nation again when the State of Israel was proclaimed. In one day this happened, fulfilling the prophecy of Isaiah 66:8, “Who has ever heard of such things? Who has ever seen things like this? Can a country be born in a day or a nation be brought forth in a moment? Yet no sooner is Zion in labor than she gives birth to her children.”

And now the eyes of the world are on Israel. And many believe that scripture predicts in Joel 3:1-3 that the whole world will come against Israel and that God will enter into judgement with the nations because of this.

I believe because the things prophesied have come to pass and are coming to pass. And they can be evidenced in our world today.
 
buffalo said:
Either all the Gods are selfsame, or they are not. If they are not by definition there is one who is the greatest.
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Not so. It depends on your definition of “greatest”. Zeus is greatest at hurling thunderbolts; Loki/Trickster is greatest at fooling people. Different definitions give different results.

rossum
 
Christians believe it is the true faith. If you claim to know otherwise, then the burden of proof is upon you, not us. One can believe without knowing. Indeed, that is called faith. The atheist can neither believe nor know and is always left holding nothing, recieving nothing, offering nothing.
 
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rossum said:
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buffalo:
Either all the Gods are selfsame, or they are not. If they are not by definition there is one who is the greatest.
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Not so. It depends on your definition of “greatest”. Zeus is greatest at hurling thunderbolts; Loki/Trickster is greatest at fooling people. Different definitions give different results.
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Nah… you’re conflating “greatest at X” with the notion of the greatest being, as such. I’m the greatest at making grilled cheese sandwiches (in my household). That doesn’t put me in the running for being God. 😉
 
Just a recommendation. There is a chapter in G.K.Chesterton’s ‘Everlasting Man’ entitled something like “Comparative Religions” which discusses this topic. Chesterton, as is typical, does a great job discussing this.
 
Gorgias said:
Nah… you’re conflating “greatest at X” with the notion of the greatest being, as such. I’m the greatest at making grilled cheese sandwiches (in my household). That doesn’t put me in the running for being God.
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You still have to measure “greatest”. Is the Trinitarian Christian God greater that the strictly monotheistic Jewish YHWH? What is your criterion? The two Gods are different: one is a trinity while the other isn’t. How are you going to decide their relative greatness?

rossum
 
rossum said:
You still have to measure “greatest”.
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That depends on what you mean by ‘measure’. 😉
Is the Trinitarian Christian God greater that the strictly monotheistic Jewish YHWH? What is your criterion? The two Gods are different: one is a trinity while the other isn’t.
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sigh. Seriously? They’re the same being. When I was a toddler, I perceived my Dad as a giant. When I was a teen, I perceived him quite differently. Or are you trying to suggest that the perception by an observer changes the intrinsic nature/being of the subject being observed? :roll_eyes:
How are you going to decide their relative greatness?
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Am I judging on the accuracy of the observer’s observation, or am I discussing the being who is being observed? 😉
 
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