Religion
In reply to the discussion: Religion a mental illness? [View all]mike_c
(36,281 posts)Your christian beliefs sound well outside the mainstream of christian theology, at least as I understand it, so I apologize for assuming you were more conventional.
My point was that if you reject other religious teachings outside of christianity without objective criteria for doing so then you have no more assurance that you're correct than do the people whose beliefs you reject. You each have equal likelihood of being incorrect, and when you consider how many contradictory religious beliefs have proliferated-- including atheism-- the likelihood of any such belief actually being correct becomes vanishingly small. And yet, even knowing that, people cling to superstitions and fairy tales as though they were true. They persecute one another, kill their neighbors, and go to war over them. They destroy one anothers' lives over them-- that's why I'm not all live-and-let-live about religion. It causes incalculable harm in the world, every day. It has real consequences, and if you're objective about it, you have to admit that every single religious perspective is almost certainly not the correct one, since there are so many competing and contradictory doctrines.