Assesing the 'truth'
I assumed that you already have the mindset that there is indeed one and absolute truth. If not, you can refer back to my previous post.
Now, we agreed that amongst all the religions, there is indeed one that is true. The question is, how do we find out?
Firstly, before we argue upon anything, we should filter out possible 'distortions' amongst the religion itself. What I mean is, there are many misguided teachings within religions itself! So we need to understand that before we could perform any investigations upon those religions, we must obtain the 'pure forms' of each religion to be weighted. And the way we obtain the authentic form is of course, by going back to its scripture, the source of the religion itself. By this, we need to assess all possible implications if the doctrine taught by every religion in its scripture is to be taken as 'true'. But there is a very crucial point here. We may claim that we have read the scripture of a particular religion and we've found that it's totally absurd. First, we need to question, are we interpreting the verses correctly? This, I suggest, we need to find an expert. We must not learn things about religion B from anyone that's from religion A, etc. So we need to find a 'reliable source' to explain us about a particular religion and we must make sure that the person is really faithful to the scripture of his religion, and not distorted in his views.
Next thing, one instrument that can help us investigating the true religion is, of course, by examining the claims of the religion (providing it is understood correctly). This would help filter out 'nonsensical' religions which goes completely beyond common sense. Imagine a particular religion saying that the earth was triangular (well, a bit exaggerated). This would be completely out of sense and proven wrong! But here's the idea. In scriptures, we might find claims about facts. If those facts are wrong, then we can filter out those religions to be, well, a high chance that they are false! This does not go the other way round. It may happen that many claims about facts found in a particular scripture is true, but this would not automatically announce that religion as the 'truth'! The steep is slippery here. One might instantly denounce the religion as false if they found something false about the claim of facts (assuming they interpret the verse correctly), but we can't say that the religion is true the facts in its scriptures are correct!
So much I can say about helping us search for the truth. If you notice, this is a very tough job to do. How do we even know that we are interpreting correctly of one's scripture? And how can we be sure about the facts we know are really established facts?... This is what i would discuss in the next post.
Now, we agreed that amongst all the religions, there is indeed one that is true. The question is, how do we find out?
Firstly, before we argue upon anything, we should filter out possible 'distortions' amongst the religion itself. What I mean is, there are many misguided teachings within religions itself! So we need to understand that before we could perform any investigations upon those religions, we must obtain the 'pure forms' of each religion to be weighted. And the way we obtain the authentic form is of course, by going back to its scripture, the source of the religion itself. By this, we need to assess all possible implications if the doctrine taught by every religion in its scripture is to be taken as 'true'. But there is a very crucial point here. We may claim that we have read the scripture of a particular religion and we've found that it's totally absurd. First, we need to question, are we interpreting the verses correctly? This, I suggest, we need to find an expert. We must not learn things about religion B from anyone that's from religion A, etc. So we need to find a 'reliable source' to explain us about a particular religion and we must make sure that the person is really faithful to the scripture of his religion, and not distorted in his views.
Next thing, one instrument that can help us investigating the true religion is, of course, by examining the claims of the religion (providing it is understood correctly). This would help filter out 'nonsensical' religions which goes completely beyond common sense. Imagine a particular religion saying that the earth was triangular (well, a bit exaggerated). This would be completely out of sense and proven wrong! But here's the idea. In scriptures, we might find claims about facts. If those facts are wrong, then we can filter out those religions to be, well, a high chance that they are false! This does not go the other way round. It may happen that many claims about facts found in a particular scripture is true, but this would not automatically announce that religion as the 'truth'! The steep is slippery here. One might instantly denounce the religion as false if they found something false about the claim of facts (assuming they interpret the verse correctly), but we can't say that the religion is true the facts in its scriptures are correct!
So much I can say about helping us search for the truth. If you notice, this is a very tough job to do. How do we even know that we are interpreting correctly of one's scripture? And how can we be sure about the facts we know are really established facts?... This is what i would discuss in the next post.
posted by ardianto86 at 8:16 AM
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