In Catholicism, there are three 'levels' of worship. I forget the Latin names, but you have the highest, reserved only for God in the three forms that make him up, you have a lower level reserved for almost all beings, saints and angels and you have a higher 'version' of that lower level reserved only for Mary, as she is supposed to be different to all the other creations of God.


EDIT: After 5 seconds using Google I copy/pasted this:

Dulia: the reverence we give to Saints
Hyperdulia: the reverence we give to Mary as the greatest of Saints and Mother of God
Latria: the reverence and worship we give to God alone

Edited 4/19/2014 16:37:40

LUMEN CHRISTI ! :D

This really annoys me. If people think nobody ever questions their faith in God, they are an idiot. Nowhere in the Bible does it say to worship Mary or saints either. And why do you ask for someone to explain it to you if you will not take it into consideration. Speaking of rational thinking, I just can't rationalize the idea that we are here mysteriously and just exist because we just do, and that we have no point to be here.

the FSM is the only deity that can exist because He knows everything and has said that He is the only deity. He boiled for our sins. Worship Him.

Materialism is the antithesis of awareness. You may be ruled by greed without realizing it.

ignore Kleiner Steiner, he seems like one of those Freemason/Illuminati conspiracy people.

Being, look within and ground yourself.

In order to believe in the specific god you have chosen in monotheism you need to validly decide why all the other possible gods are not a valid option fit for worship

Going right back to the beginning - this is a spurious claim. Consider the following scenario:

Imagine your partner were to leave the home and return several hours later. As you are an inquisitive chap you ask her where she has been - 'shopping' she replies. You notice an absence of shopping bags, on mentioning this she replies that she was 'just looking'. Your imagination conjours up several different alternative possibilities:
a. She went shopping
b. She is having an affair with another man and was him
c. She was abducted by aliens who implanted a chip in her to make her think she was shopping
d. She is a spy who lives a double life of which you are oblivious
e. She lied and went to an art gallery.

One point to note about the above is that there are (probably) infinitely many possibilities about what your partner was doing.

In the scenario you are justified in believing a; you certainly aren't intellectually required to rule out all alternative possibilities - to demand we do so would require ruling out an infinite number of options and more importantly is not something we demand in the ordinary requirements of justification.

It strikes me that the case of judging where your partner has been is epistemically analogous to that presented by the OP to do with religions.

That's not to say that the the theist is off the hook however. Hume presented an argument against faith based on miracles which works on similar but importantly different lines. Hume argued that all religions (or at least many) were able to claim miracles which justified the believers faith in that that there was only one true religion. Hume also suggested that each religion was similarly justified in the claims that their miracles were genuine and that in effect all these competing truth claims cancelled each other out. To illustrate imagine each of the following religions claims 1000 miracles each, all with similar levels of justification:
a. Islam
b. Christianity
c. Judaism
d. Sikhism

In the above case then Christianity would have 3000 miracles which showed that it was not true versus 1000 in the case of its truth - in this instance therefore the wise man would conclude that Christian miracles do not demonstrate the truth of Christianity (at least not exclusively). Mutatis mutandis we can conclude the same for each of the other religions.

This would therefore show that any religion which is based on miraculous claims (or any other religious experience) should not be accepted. This would surely rule out each of the above religions.I wouldn't however conclude that monotheism is wrong - instead I would conclude that each of the religious traditions claims to exclusivity is at best on very shaky grounds.

A far more plausible response, to my mind, is to suggest that each religion contains insights into The Ultimate Reality but skewed in a particular way by the concepts culturally relative ideas and concepts open to us.

Edited 4/21/2014 18:03:31

That's a really shitty analogy. Is your girlfriend cheating on you?

What a charming chap you are Mulva.

Edited 4/21/2014 18:47:04

i save my charm for those who are worthy. so far, only aranka.

Your charm, as displayed in this thread is in much need of improvement.

If you believe in a religion, you have to give it your complete obedience. What is the point of Believing in the LORD, if you will not obey the First commandment? You shall have no other Gods. I am sure that is a big tenant in other major religions. If you won't follow this law, why believe in any religion?

And if you have doubts in a divine being, listen to this. The second rule of thermodynamics state that entropy (chaos) always increases. Ex. You can mix cream in coffee but you can't take cream out of coffee.
The Universe is becoming increasingly chaotic, it is just the natural way of it. Yet, here on Earth it is not. Life is the exact opposite of chaos. What is the human body but a series of controlled chemical reactions under the influence of a self replicating molecule called DNA? And if DNA can only be replicated from former DNA, how would it have been created originally? Truly, any man of science would realize that life couldn't even hypothetical exist in this universe so you are forced to believe that we were made by a divine being.

In any closed system entropy is always increasing. However, neither a cell nor a human is a closed system. When material gets more organized and becomes a cell, that comes at a cost to the organization of the matter outside of the cell. This does not violate thermodynamics.

Actually the base components of life have been created from the constituents of the early Earth. We are not forced to believe anything.

Ah, I forgot that that detail. Anyways I love a good debate.
Still kinda spins your head a little bit.

Edited 4/22/2014 17:25:53

Dubs,
I know many Sikhs who are monotheists but think that their way of worshipping God is only one of the valid ways of doing so.

I didn't say everyone was like that. I know people who have been to many types of churches as well. You usually know when you found the one that suits you though, and that is all that matters I guess.

I must have misread... I took: 'If you believe in a religion, you have to give it your complete obedience.' to suggest that you thought monotheism implied particularism.

My Religion is F***youtism