Religion Confusion, Part 3½

Some clarification would be nice, if you please …

It has been brought to my attention that I may have skipped a crucial step (or two) in my rhetorical process back in Part 1 where I started by talking about truth, and then launched into a discussion of religion, without adequately explaining the connection between the two. I made the unwarranted assumption that the connection was obvious. Sorry about that. Permit me to fill in that blank part of the picture by defining a few terms and connecting some of the dots.

“God” is that entity (whoever or whatever it may be) that we choose to revere and honor above all others. I refer to the Creator of the universe as “God” or “the God” (with a capital G) and anyone or anything else one may choose to so honor as “god” or “a god” (with a small g). Since the four religious systems I’m discussing in this series all recognize the Creator-of-the-universe-God, that’s where my focus is at the moment.

“Religion” is one’s belief system, the way one thinks about and worships God, either by oneself or within a group. I personally feel that, since it deals directly with God, religion is (or should be) of paramount importance in our lives.

“Worship,” as I stated in paragraph 2 of Part 1, is that which is due to God as a matter of simple justice. He created us (as well as everything else we could possibly want or need) out of nothing and sustains us in existence moment by moment. We should recognize that He didn’t have to create us at all, but did so out of pure love. Since it is better to exist than not to, we owe Him a specially elevated kind of respect, honor and gratitude: worship.

I also stated in that same paragraph that God is the essence and source of all truth (or reality). Since He created everything that is real (even our mental abilities to imagine things that aren’t real), and in fact had to pre-exist everything else in order to do so, all reality comes from Him and He has reality as one of His own attributes (since one cannot give what one doesn’t already possess). “Truth” is our recognition of or conformity to things as they actually exist.

“Confusion,” on the other hand, is a failure to recognize truth on some level, and I contend that this is not a desirable condition, and that it is worth a considerable effort to overcome one’s confusion and so approach closer to the ascertainable objective truth about God and the universe.

By “the true religion,” I mean those things God (presumably) revealed about Himself, about us and our relationship to Him, coupled with those practices He (presumably) wishes us to follow in learning about Him and in worshiping Him. I am presuming for the sake of discussion that God did in fact reveal such things to mankind, and therefore that a “true” religion does indeed exist.

Since truth comes from God, and our recognition of truth leads us back toward God, and religion is the way we think about God and worship Him, it is my view that the religion we should want to adopt ought to be rooted in truth. If I can identify aspects of a particular religious system that diverge from truth, then perhaps it is reasonable to conclude that such a system might not be the true religion.

I hope that clears things up a bit.