Sunday, December 14, 2014

God's Divine Word or Subjective Interpretation?

nbparanormal.wordpress.com


We live in a world that adheres to many different dogmas. Within just the Christian sect, there are tens of thousands of variations on that central theme. This fact alone has started many down the path of rubbing their index finger on their jawline, scrunching up their mouths, arching the left eyebrow, and ultimately discarding religion all together because well... it makes sense to.
ReligionAdherents
Christianity[4]2.2 billion
Islam1.6 billion
Secular[a]/Nonreligious[b]/Agnostic/Atheist≤ 1.1 billion
Hinduismbillion
Chinese traditional religion[c]394 million
Buddhism376 million
Ethnic religions excluding some in separate categories300 million
African traditional religions100 million
Sikhism23 million
Juche[d]19 million
Spiritism15 million
Judaism14 million
Bahá'í7 million
Jainism4.2 million
Shinto4 million
Cao Dai4 million
Zoroastrianism2.6 million
Tenrikyo2 million
Neo-Paganism1 million
Unitarian Universalism800,000
Rastafarianism600,000
Size of Major Religious Groups, 2012
ReligionPercent
Christianity
  
31.5%
Muslim
  
23.2%
Unaffiliated
  
16.3%
Hindu
  
15.0%
Buddhist *
  
7.1%
Folk
  
5.9%
Other
  
0.8%
Jewish
  
0.2%
Pew Research Center, 2012[2]

And yet still, this is not a red flag to the true believers. Why the hell not?

The word divine means that it is 'of god', right? To me, that means what is being handed down is truly his divine word and there would only be one message, not a gazillion different ways of looking at things. For this very reason, having numerous, in my opinion - subjective interpretations - means that these religions are not imbued with his divine word, but rather all the different religions are man-made because every off-shoot has been tailored according to the one who initially heralded it. There seems to be no other take-away from this.

Not one person of faith has been able to detail to me how my thought process about this issue could be any different than what I've resolved in my head. My initial assumption is that religions (all) are basically just created to appease an individual's ideal about what religion means to them. They wear what feels right for them and then encourage others to follow their ideals. If they're lucky, it's popular and it grows. If not, it falls by the wayside and dies out.

Luckily, people with a natural bent towards the supernatural have so many to choose from that if they get bored with what they were indoctrinated with or the religion doesn't meet their needs anymore, they can switch and try on another more to their current liking.

For us non-believers we'll continue to just pick apart the illogical and continue to point out what so richly deserves to the criticized.

2 comments:

  1. Great post.
    Love this - and can't wait to see how much those figures have changed in 5, 10, 30 years...
    -D

    ReplyDelete