(...continued)

However, on the spiritual plane, diversity of gods as well as diversity of philosophical-moral-instruction is necessary in order to cater for diverse people of diverse propensities. For some, the best results may be achieved by worshipping the God-of-Abraham while for others it may best be to worship other gods, including even self-invented ones.

Hinduism has always recognised this need for diversity and encouraged people to select their own form of God (Ishta-Deva) to worship for which they feel more affection.

This is not to deny the oneness of God, but rather to acknowledge the weakness of the human mind, which finds it difficult-to-impossible to develop feelings of love towards that which cannot be defined, which has no attributes, no form, no colour, no sound, no texture, no smell, no taste and no practical utility.

Even the God-of-Abraham, which presumably has no form (although ancient Jews, before the Rambam, believed that he had a size - 1/3 of the universe) has a utilitarian value, that of creator, protector and judge. For some this is sufficient in order to truly love Him, but not for others who need a more vivid and tangible representation.

Yuyutsu wrote:

“Scientists can go wrong. The mechanics of Newton was replaced by Einstein's relativity and technology was adjusted to accommodate this. Those ancients who looked upon worship as mere technology would have no problem to modify it, which they did when they embraced Christianity.”

Dear Yuyutsu,

Science does not deal in right and wrong. Science deals with the best explanation for phenomena available according the knowledge of the time. Newton’s mechanics with its laws of motion described perfectly what could be measured by instruments available at the time. Newton had no reason not to believe the invariance of time and space. Newtonian mechanics was a great advance on Aristotelian physics.

With such developments as the Michelson-Morley experiment which showed that the speed of light was not affected by the velocity of the object producing that light Einstein developed new theories to account for the new evidence. That is the way science works. All scientific laws are provisional and can be discarded or modified by new evidence. Science contains a growing body of knowledge as new evidence, experiment and theory replaces what has been found to be inadequate to explain observed phenomena.

Religion has no such corrective. The almost ubiquitous nature of monotheism in the western world is due to Constantine favouring Christianity and Theodosius making it the official religion of the Roman Empire and persecuting those who wanted to retain their faith in the gods. There is no more evidence for the existence of the God of the Bible than for the existence of Jupiter. The ancients in general did not embrace Christianity. It was forced upon them by the power of Rome.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christian_persecution_of_paganism_under_Theodosius_I

However, even the most fervent believer of religion generally wants to get along in the world unless they are so besotted by faith that they fly airplanes into buildings. There is no evidence that any woman has ever become pregnant without the intervention of a human sperm. Nevertheless most believers in the Virgin Mary would not accept the assertion of a pregnant daughter that it was the work of a supernatural being.

Foxy, your 2nd link did not work either the first and second were
different, 0 & o were changed. I suspect you are actually typing the
urls in by hand. Certain way to have trouble.
Use tinyurl as I wrote in another thread.

You said;Do you really believe that people practice their
religions in exactly the same way?

No of course, Shia and Sunni etc come to mind and the fanatical
cults within them, eg wahabis etc show that.
That however is not the point, it is undeniable that the terrorists
are moslems and they come from within the moslem community.
So to protect ourselves what should we do; ban Buddists ?
I think not, we can only tackle the problem where it is, not in some
examination of the innermost thoughts that someone may have in the future.
No, this is a matter of survival, nothing more, nothing less.
We have no way of identifying those who may do us harm or their future
children they may have but the one constant is their religion.

The suggestion to promote polytheism as an antidote to theocracy was tried by Tutankhamen and by Rome's least-worst emperor, Julian. It didn't work. The answer to theocracy is atheism. The answer in Australia to Moslem theocracy is to stop them coming in and at the least sign of their trying to coerce people into deferring to the rulings and symbols of their cult, kick the bastards out. A measure the British and Europeans might profitably adopt.

Meanwhile an ideological war against the Moslems' "holy book" - bigotry on steroids that rival theocrat George Pell characterised as chock full of violence.

Such an ideological war could accompany the ideological wars against drugs and dangerous driving.

Dear Emperor Julian,

I refer you to the last two sentences of my post:

"It would be good if Christianity, Judaism, Islam and Baha’i could all be replaced by a resurgent polytheism. It would be better to abandon superstition altogether."

Dear David,

Point taken about science and the Romans.
So the Romans didn't even get a chance to be logically convinced that Jupiter doesn't exist, that's because they were coerced to forsake him even earlier, how nice...

Well then we are not talking religion at all, but merely about the brutish emperor's decrees. I still think that it is easier to refute the existence of Jupiter than the existence of the God-of-the-bible, simply because the former has more attributes.

As I mentioned, such refutation should not have any effect on a religious person anyway. Since truly religious people (as opposed to opportunists who believe that they can use God as a tool for their benefit, or to Romans who worship God in order to keep their head attached to their neck) are not looking for material rewards, they care not about God's existence.

«There is no evidence that any woman has ever become pregnant without the intervention of a human sperm.»

Thank goodness for that: had there been such evidence, then the belief in the Virgin Mary would become a practical-scientific conclusion, which would have jeopardised the practice of faith.

«even the most fervent believer of religion generally wants to get along in the world»

Well what is the correlation coefficient between "fervent believer of religion" and "religious"? I think it's very close to 0, if not even negative.

The closer one comes to God, the more happiness and contentment they find within, hence the less often they become interested in either getting along in the world or in blowing it up.