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Many religions, a common ground

"I contend we are both atheists, I just believe in one fewer god than you do. When you understand why you dismiss all the other possible gods, you will understand why I dismiss yours."

Stephen Roberts


The presupposition behind these phrase seems to be that any concept of God is equally arbitrary, and any believer of whatever religion base her beliefs on pure whim or blindly follows any religious tradition she received in her upbringing.

If this believer rejects other religious traditions for being incompatible with her own, she rejects these traditions because she thinks they are human-based, or devil-based: they don't originate from her god.

In order to become a full atheist she only has to realize that her beliefs are equally arbitrary to the ones she criticizes.

But these presuppositions are wrong. Not every religion sees other religious traditions as purely arbitrary. See Catholicism for example: it currently teaches that there is value in other religious traditions. There is even a line of apologetics that sees the different religions as evidence that human beings have a natural thirst for spiritual things, even when their particular beliefs may be misguided at times. Somehow people have a perception of God that is beyond doctrine.

Many religious persons these days subscribe to different forms of monotheism. It's true that some of these monotheisms are mutually exclusive in some of their beliefs; but these doesn't imply that they don't have a core of common religious experience they express according to their particular religious idiosyncrasies, that religions don't try to reach an spiritual dimension that is truly there.

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