It’s only a logical fallacy if I begin from the premise that there is only one true religion or that religions are mandated by Deity, which I don’t.
I begin from the premise that there is something beyond humanity and that religion is man’s attempt to and description of how to go about interacting with that something. They grow organically out of their specific time and culture and continue to do so as long as they remain an adequate means of expressing that need for interaction…
response: (also back from the weekend
) the logical fallacy is in the assumption your above description is the
only method of religious creation & evolution–it never adresses the possibility of
revelation–the Eternal and Transendent initiating the echange of information rather than human beings being the instigators. Rather than “man’s search for God”, the history of Judaism and Christianity is “God’s search for man” Revealed religions stand or fall on the accuracy of the revelation–much like history. A historian who claims certain events occured in the historical record and cannot back such claims will be discounted (some historians
manufacture “evidence”, such as Michael Bellesiles in his book
Arming America–and despite some politicaly-rabid gun control advocates still citing him, Bellesiles’s book is regarded by his peers as egregiously fraudulent)
Judaism historicaly claims to be a religion of
God acting in history–the events happened and it was God who initiated them–a process which continued and intensified into the Incarnation. Judaism **does **have gaps in some of the events chronicled–said gaps becoming less and less as time went on. In the NT we have a near-unparrelled small gap (in ancient text criteria)., from the events to the text-writing. The only other example like this (that come to my mind right away
) is Thudycises’s *The Peloponesian War–*and the surviving texts of
TPW all date from nearly a thousand years after the events, but are regarded in the main as reliable historical commentary. There is just
not the time for the NT to “grow organically out of their specific time and culture”–The “mythologized Jesus” requires an unbelievably rapid accretion of the supernatural events and claims **and that done so in a communty of witnesses who knew Jesus and who could challenge any fallacious claims about him. **The creed of the Ressurection in 1 Cor 15: 1-19 is ONLY 23 years at the most–the belief in Jesus’s Resurection in 1 Thess is even less–19 years. The “mythologized Jesus” thesis first started in the early “Enlightenment” when those skeptics
assumed the NT texts had to be written at least 100-200 years after the “supposed” events–those skeptics had a pretty good idea for what it took for legend and myth to be added to history. However, 200 years of archaelogical findings (including discovery of progressivley older NT texts & fragments) and linguistic analysis has kept pushing back the writing dates, where the “mythologizing” thesis becomes less and less tenable
No, I don’t think all religions are compelling fictions or human imagination creations in the sense that they were intentionally made up by specific individuals, like a novel or a committee report.
response: that contradicts the actual meaning of your “They grow organically out of their specific time and culture and continue to do so as long as they remain an adequate means of expressing that need for interaction.”
Someone has to be introducing these changes in contradiction to the witnesses testimony–to say “grow organicaly” is the current verbiage to avoid the “blame game”
Who. What, When, Where and How?
I am talking about the religions that have survived their creators .
dessert