One Relgion

This is my reply to a reply to my original post. That which is true in my reply is God's and the errors are mine.

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Firstly, there aren't different Christian religions. There is one Christian religion which happens to be made up of several different ways of approaching God. Secondly, there is Absolute Truth. My contention is simply that we will never know what it is while we see through a glass darkly. Thus it is indeed true that our perception of Truth changes and therefore truth can not be known absolutely by us.

How is it that there are not different Christian Religions? They all believe different things about Jesus and in fact they do not all agree even on what he said or even what books should be in the Bible. Now you can say this is all because we can not know truth clearly. However was that not one of the reasons the Christ came to redeem us. He did not have to spend 30 years here on earth, but one drop of his blood would have been sufficient. He spent 30 years to teach us how to get to heaven.I think that if you add up the sum total of all Christian beliefs and eliminate all those that contradict you would be left with nothing other than that Christ existed. From this one must conclude what you believe does not matter, that you just have to believe in Jesus to be saved. Yet even to say this is rejected by certain Christian religions. So if all Christian religions contain error. To belong to any one Christian denomination would not get you to heaven, and as all contradictions must be rejected, to accept one or the other contradiction would be to run the risk of offending God and to accept error. Also to simply believe in Jesus as sufficient is rejected by some Christian denominations and therefore must be rejected, as it too, is a contradiction. One must, therefore, completely reject Christianity as false.Yet I reject the idea that God would put us in such a predicament. God is both perfectly good and perfectly just. He must therefore have given us a clear road to heaven, and he also must have given us a clear authority as to what that road is. That road therefore must be the one Christian denomination that possesses the entire deposit of faith.

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None of the Apostles are still alive now, it being 2000 years later and all.
This is obviously true; however they passed the Faith on to those that came after and so on down through the centuries. If then they had Christ's authority to teach, they must have also passed this on. It also means they must have agreed as to what was to be taught as true, and what was to be rejected as false. This authority must also have been passed down though the centuries so that a clear road to heaven could be seen.

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That may have something to do with the fact that religion, unlike those other things, cannot be proved (or at least demonstrated with falsifiable evidence).

There are many aspects of beliefs concerning God that can be arrived at through reason without faith, though one may accept them on faith. This included the existence of God. This has been demonstrated by Aristotle, and has been expanded upon by Thomas Aquinas in his Summa Theologica. One may arrive sufficiently by reason to the point where, by the grace of God, one can accept on faith those things that cannot be known, or understood, through reason.

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I don't see how that follows. "Christ is with us" does not translate to "we have no error" - look at all the times the disciples got things wrong in the Gospels! And they had Christ actually physically there, rather than the Spiritual Presence we have now!

Indeed the disciples did get things wrong during their training as Christ preached in his public life. But that cannot be said of them after the Pentecost, and least not when it came to teaching on faith and morals. They may have got things wrong on other things; they were still human. But on faith and morals they had the protection of the Holy Spirit. That must be so or what would the point be of Christ coming to teach us. If human nature's tendency to error was not in some way protected when it came to his Church.

I did not quote all of the remarks of Marvin the Martian to which I have responded however I think I have quoted the most pertinent ones.

Thank you Marvin for a well thought out and gracious reply.