There
is simply no compelling reason to assume that whatever your parents and
ancestors believed was the truth, and it also does not make any
reasonable sense just to ‘believe’ and take a leap of faith without any
sort of reasonable justification.
And what sort of reasoning
would lead one to conclude that the true religion should make you rich,
or that by merely believing in a particular person or thing you will get
eternal life?
Of course, one of the favourite reasons for
justifying a choice of religion is that someone started following this
religion, it changed their life and they’re happy! This actually does
make some sense, since there are some good reasons to believe that this
is what the true religion should do, but the problem here is that lots
of other people make the same claim about
their different religious experiences. It seems that we have been
created to be religious. It’s part of our nature. If we don’t follow one
of the standard religions we’ll soon invent one! So some religion will
always make us happier than none.
So again, just claiming your
religion is true because it changed your life can’t be on its own a
sound criterion, because then other religions must also be true because
they too have changed peoples’ lives. In fact, even someone who has
decided to believe that there is no Creator at all might make the same
claim that he or she used to follow a religion and now they don’t, and
they are more happy and free! As the saying goes, what’s good for the
goose is good for the gander. If it’s true for one it must be true for
the other also.
So these are all mere claims. Claims need to be proven.
Abdur-Raheem Green
