soc religion christian re the arrogance of christians in a previous message aa freenet carleton ca mark baker writes if i don t think my belief is right and everyone else s belief is wrong then i don t have a belief this is simply what belief means more stuff deleted this seems to be a pretty arogant definition of belief my beliefs are those things which i find to be true based on my experience of the world this experience includes study of things that i may not have experienced directly but even then i can only understand the studies to the extent to which i can relate what i study back to what i have experienced which means that by beliefs about god are directly related to my experience of god having experienced god i try to make sense of that experience i study religion and read the bible i find things that echo what i have already experienced out of this i build my beliefs i also find things that don t match my experience that doesn t make them false they just don t match my experience maybe i will understand that stuff later i don t know maybe all of my beliefs are wrong i can change my beliefs if someone else has beliefs that are different from mine so what neither of us are necessarily wrong someone else is making sense out of a different set of experiences even though we have different explanations and beliefs if we talk we might even discover that the underlying experiences are similar some people approach religion as a truth that can only exist in one form and usually has a single revelation the more dogmatic and inflexible the belief system the more arrogant it will appear to an outsider there is another approach possible however god is a mystery i am trying to solve the mystery so i look at the evidence available to me i try to arrive at the best understanding that i can based on the evidence new evidence may cause me to change my understanding when i encounter someone with a different belief than my own it isn t a threat it is an opportunity to perhaps discover something new about this mystery i can never fully comprehend peace will taber william taber will taber dg com any opinions expressed data general corp will futon webo dg com are mine alone and may westboro mass change without notice when all your dreams are laid to rest you can get what s second best but it s hard to get enough david wilcox
