Zyra's front page //// Belief //// Concepts //// Site Index
What if ALL religions are wrong?
This is an interesting idea which comes from the fact that MOST religions are wrong (which has already been proved). As it is a fact that most of the people who believe in a religion are actually believing in a wrong religion, and at the very best, only a minority of people believe in the right religion, whichever that is, then the thought is: What if ALL religions are wrong?
A universe which fits with Atheism is one possibility, although that's pretty straightforward. What I'm suggesting is something much more scary, which is that the true situation is that there IS a "True Religion", but that it is not any of the ones which anyone currently believes in! This is as likely as any of the mainstream religions being the One True Religion, as they are all based on faith and imaginative guesswork.
This is as likely as not, as it's generally agreed that even if ANY religion is true, whatever God or Gods exist, they have left scant evidence, and in some cases deliberately misleading evidence. Most religions have as a tenet the idea that you are supposed to believe "because of faith", so what happens is that people believe in very different things from each other, as they have different imaginary ideas about the Universe, or, if they have less imagination themselves, they are following the teachings of notable people in the distant past, many of whom had bizarre imaginative ideas and the delusion that they were the only truly inspired person.
The problem of trying to decide which of the religions is the true religion is a bit like there being an election where you can vote, but whichever of the candidates wins they will find out who didn't vote for them and have them all tortured. Traditionally, your best defence in that situation would be to vote for whichever God or religion you thought was most likely, and then hope you were right. Really though, it's not good enough, and is entirely unacceptable! If Amnesty International were in the business of human rights for the Soul in the afterlife rather than for human rights of people who are alive and suffering today, they would most likely condemn most of the deities in the way Amnesty International condemn dictators, torturers, and various other forms of earthly tyranny!
Back to the main point though: As we already know that MOST religions are wrong, then what if ALL religions are wrong? There might conceivably be a TRUE religion which is the actual fact and yet which no-one believes in. As a result, you might find when you die that there is an afterlife which is truly bizarre and in which some God or Gods which you'd never heard of are going to judge you on the basis of some entirely arbitrary set of principles which you had no idea about and which there was no clue to in the earthly life. In the absence of evidence, this is as likely as any of the common modern mainstream religions.
The absence of evidence of any truth in the commonplace religions is compounded by various charlatanry and fakery which further discredits the religion. You can see most much-vaunted miracles are bogus whenever their scope is very poor. It makes them look like miraculous writings on a banana
Of course you could make up your own religion, and you'd be as likely to be right as the people who have founded a religion in the past. The thing is, though, you live in a more modern enlightened age, so you could make up a much better, fairer, more tolerant, and better-designed religion than those old prophets have done. Remember: This is no joke. You have to make a good job of it.
Some time ago, before 1986, I believed in a religion which was based on my own visions of the future and other things. It was pretty good, and I could see the future Internet, some of the social trends in the distant future, spacecraft engines, and other crazy things. As a Paranoid Schizophrenic myself, I have a considerable advantage in being able to be so inspired! There were miracles that happened, and also, it was in my opinion a much better belief system than the normal religions which so many people are slaves to. It was a much fairer system and was more enlightened. What let it down in my opinion was that the miracles failed to include my own making of a lot of money, so I gave it an ultimatum of two weeks to fix this, and when it failed at that point I replaced it with Direct Drive, which is a philosophical system that ACTUALLY WORKS. Since then, I have made a lot of money.