Did You Know That Not Everybody Is The Same Religion As You?

It's easy to assume that everybody thinks like you do when everybody around you does think like you. When it comes to religion, a vast majority of people in the United States are Christians of one flavor or another. Nebraska is even more homogenous in its religious leanings, a small Nebraska town might have a Presbyterian Church on one side of town and a United Church of Christ on the other side of town...and people think that they're different! Christianity is so much the default position for spirituality that even people who don't attend church, don't pray, don't have any spiritual tendencies at all, would be appalled and insulted if you suggested that they weren't Christian. But the truth is that there are a varity of different faiths and people who lack faith as well. There are Hindu temples, mosques, Buddhists, Baha'is, Wiccans and (gasp) atheists...in Lincoln they're all over! Yet many of these "others" are viewed as abberations, somehow spiritually wrong.

Now if Christianity, or for that matter Islam or any other religion had objective proof, or even a hint that their faith was the correct one, that would be one thing, but there isn't a religion out there that can present any kind of proof, however small, that what they believe is right. Now some folks will say that there is proof, that, for example they prayed for something and it happened! Well, people from other religions pray and claim the same results, so we're deadlocked there. Another thing that most people don't consider, even when they claim to have "talked with God" (i.e. that is God talking back!) or "experienced God's love", when pressed to recount in detail exactly what they experienced, usually describe a very subjective feeling, that may, if you take their word for it, indicate the existance of some deity of some kind, but doesn't all all indicate that the warm, fuzzy feeling comes from the god who ordered all the Amalekites killed, knocked down the walls of Jericho and wrote on then tablets. In other words, it is a subjective spiritual experience that the recipient chooses to label in a familiar manner.

But we have A BOOK that was given to us by GOD! Really? What you have is a collection of books that someone claims was given by God. So why should the subjective religious experiences written down thousands of years ago and copied and recopied and translated and mistranslated, in a culture very unlike our own, trump our own religious experience today?

Don't get me wrong, I'm not against Christianity or even religion in general, and I'm by no means an atheist (although I sometimes act like one and often take their side in an argument) but the position that any one faith is THE one true way to look at things is arrogant and msiguided.

So get off your high horse and stop condescending to those who are different, stop thinking that they're going to a hell that they don't believe in and that you need to convert them!

Happy Halloween!