re: Good news for some. Pat Robertson says homosexuals will soon "die out"....

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The god I believe in doesn't require a necessary score of truths in order to get in to heaven.

Oh, you get 3 points for believing X from Catholicism, 2 points for blieving Y from Buddhism, and 4 points for believing Z from Hinduism. Doesn't work like that.

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I'm not talking about keeping score, but understanding truth. How do you know anything about God if you cannot trust anything written by men about Him? Picking and choosing what sounds right to you from various religions might seem to work for you, but what basis do you use to determine what is right and wrong from any particular religion?

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Likewise, I don't believe religions are mutually exclusive in the sense that one religion has all the answers and is exactly right and then all the other religions are wrong, even if they share some of the principles of the 'correct' religion. To me, that is entirely too simplistic of a way to view it.

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I believe it's Occam's razor that states that the simplest explanation is best when the truth is not certain. In that regard, I don't think having a simple way to view truth is a bad thing.

To your point, though, you seem to be saying that you don't believe any single religion has all the answers, therefore you can pick and choose at will from any of them to come up with a system of belief that you believe to be true. If that's the case, how do you determine truth? If you don't believe the Bible, the Qur'an, the Bhagavad Gita, or any other religious text is accurate in its entirety, how can you believe anything they say at all in order to incorporate those pieces into your own system?

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Coupled with what I said earlier about religions literally being created by men and then those same men then legitimizing those laws with the 'mouthpiece of god' nonsense, you'll understand why I respectfully disagree with you and the other poster's ideas abnout the exclusivity of one religion having it all figured it out.

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You and others often say "written by men" as if to say a particular religious text is "completely fabricated out of nothing by men with vivid imaginations". Those of us who Believe that the Bible is the word of God also believe that the text was written down by men (several) over a long period of time, but what we also believe is that those men were inspired by God to write the truths that He wanted to communicate to mankind.

If, then, those words are true, then anything contradictory to them from other religious texts must be false. The same can be said for those other religious texts: if they are true, anything contradictory to them must be false. If you don't think that a particular religion has exclusive rights to the truth, then you must have a pretty accurate way of knowing the truth. Care to share?