Those who never heard about Jesus?

[Esaias]

Originally Posted by Antipas

I agree. Maybe I should have worded that better. Perhaps I should have said - Religious dogmas mean nothing when you have an experience.

Thank you for pointing that out.



Who is to say that we must agree? Might your truth be true for you and my truth true for me?

If something is true, it is true regardless if any, some, none, or all acknowledge it to be true. There is no such thing as relative truth, as in "true for you but not for me". 2+2=4 for both of us, even if I believe with all my heart that 2+2=5. In that case, I do not have an alternative truth, I simply have an error, ie a falsehood.

The word truth implies objectivity, not relativity. So "true for thee but not for me" is inherently a contradiction and a non-possibility. We may have different even contradictory opinions, but not truths. If something is a truth, that simply means it is factual and corresponds to reality. And therefore cannot differ from one person to another. Facts are, after all, facts.

Religion and metaphysics and ethics and philosophy and theology are a searching out of the facts, and drawing conclusions from those facts. If truth is relative, then there is no such thing as knowing - of any kind, except the delusional, illusory, non-reality kind.

For example, let's assume that your experience leads you to embrace reincarnation. Yet, my intuitive sense lends me to not embrace reincarnation. Should we battle it out over reincarnation, or might there be a reason why you were intuitively led along that understanding? Might the Divine Reality have reincarnation in store for you and not for me? Or might the topic be of more importance for you to examine at this time than it is for me?

Who determines the importance of a particular "life topic"? Who determines what life topics are to be explored, as you put it? Either reincarnation is a factual reality... or it is not. Even if reincarnation were selective (only certain people reincarnate) it would still be a fact. So either it exists... or it does not.

If it does, and I believe it does not, then I am deceived. And deception is inferior to knowing reality. If reincarnation is false, and yet I believe that it is true, then again my knowing does not correspond with Reality, and I am under a spell of delusion. And since knowing things as they are is superior in every way to "knowing" things as they are not (ie knowing truth is better than not knowing truth, and being deceived), then it follows that if we desire to know reality we will begin with the assumption that some things are true and their opposites are false, and that falsehood is to be rejected.

Why is a mistaken idea bad? Do we not learn many lessons from our mistakes? What if a mistaken idea is necessary for one of us to learn a series of very important lessons for our soul's development?

My previous paragraph answers that question.