3 How Can You Say There's Only One True Faith?

Index post : Rebecca McLaughlin Wrote a Book

Because religions really and truly contradict.

In some cases it is obvious because of splits.

Samaritans, Jews and Christians represent two splits in the times after those of Solomon and of Jesus Christ.

Catholics, Non-Chalcedonians, Orthodox, Protestants, this represents splits around Third and Fourth Ecumenical council, two splits, and in the 11th C leading up to the councils of Pisa and Florence, and in the 16th C. (mainly) leading up to the Council of Trent, on the Catholic side.

If both sides of a split cannot be right, then these people cannot all be right.

One could argue they are all wrong, but the question was, about why one could say there is ONLY one true faith, not why there is even as many as one.

And note, the main alternative over the last 200 years in the Western World, namely Secularism (sometimes in the guise of Freemasonry) is also another split, if not in all its doctrines, at least in its main culture.

If you want to confer with Japan, it is true some people there manage to be both Shinto and Buddhist — but this is in a compromise where the two religions take part of different aspects of life. You marry Shinto, you usually get buried Buddhist. It could be because of kind of a make-believe : you take the religion which is most optimistic for the occasion. When it comes to a third belief system in Japan, Scientism, one of the aspects of secularism over here, Michio Kaku has shown he takes it more seriously, but that might be because he is living in the US, not in Japan.

Catholicism, as well as its alternatives, like Fundie Calvinism or Orthodox Lutheranism, have a very obvious knack of combining the areas of life which a Japanese would outsource between different religions. Marriage? We have the Catholic sacrament of matrimony. Funerals? We have Masses for the dead, and for some very good people, masses for gratitude for God granting them holy lives. Science? We have scholasticism.

The alternative to Catholicism being true would be some other combination on all areas being true — even if it were outsourcing the areas to different origins, like the Japanese tend to do. But if Catholicism is true, this means Christ rose from the dead and founded the Catholic Church. Therefore Catholicism + some other is not a real option. That includes Catholicism + Santería and also Catholicism + Deep Time + Deep Space + Big Bang + Evolution. Not real options.