To many, it's a matter of taste.   What do I find most palatable?   Some can be insistent that their preference in the best.   Yet, most seem to agree that ultimately, it is a personal and subjective choice, and that no one else has the right to tell you that you are wrong.    Now, I could be merely talking about our thoughts on the best flavor of ice cream.   Unfortunately, I am not.  What I am referring to is what we each of us deem as spiritual or religious truth.  

For at least several decades now, the Western world seems to have endorsed the idea that such matters cannot be objectively verified or authenticated.  Religion is purely subjective "faith".  All world-views and religions, therefore, must all equally valid.   In a "pluralistic" society we must all tolerate every belief as an individual's "truth" and not criticize or question another.  To do so is labeled as "intolerance" or "religious bigotry".

This concept has manifested itself in various religious ideals, primarily that "all roads lead to God" and that your religious "truth" and my religious "truth" are both true and tangential to the same God.   Could this be true?   Does God tolerant whatever characteristics or name one might assign to Him (or Her), knowing that all beliefs are equally true?   I have even been told that God IS whatever we personally belief him to be.  So He is a cow to the Brahman, the Goddess to the Wiccan, and Allah to the Muslim.   In short, He is the Great Cosmic Lump of Playdough, molded and shaped by the whim and imagination of every Tom, Dick and Harry.     This whole premise, that spiritual matters are subjective and equally true, I reject categorically.

 The fact of the matter is, the great post-modernist hypothesis that all beliefs are equally true, is really just a road sign that the human race is slipping from it's hard-fought position of being a rational animal, into a quagmire of irrationality and cognitive dissonance.    To say that all religions are valid is a mental cop-out; it is turning off our upper cerebral functions in the name of pluralism.  For example, in respect to science, we cannot logically hold to the contradictory ideas that the solar system is Geocentric and Heliocentric at the same time.  It must be one or another, and our brain weighs the data and makes a determination.    How can we say then that Humanistic Atheism and Christian Theism are equally true?  You cannot. They are contradictory at their very core.  Likewise, most every religion makes specific claims, and many are contradictory with the claims of other religions.  For example, Christianity says that Jesus physically rose from the dead.  The Koran repudiates this.  One must be right, the other wrong.   Consequently, employing the presupposition that it is better to believe what is true and right, and disbelieve that which is false and erroneous, we can see we have an obligation to weigh the data and make an educated judgment on what various religions claim.   One might call that intolerant.  In reality, however, it is simple common sense.  

  Where does one begin with in the quest to discover what is objectively "true" and what is "false" with respect to religion and spirituality?    Like anything else, there must be some degree of evidence to examine to form an opinion.   Although most Christians feel that their religion is one of "faith", (Belief in something despite the evidence) that is not an accurate representation of what Jesus and the apostles preached.    Throughout the Bible, we see Jesus making a point to show that he was the fulfillment of previous messianic prophecies.    The apostles go to great lengths to prove this fact, and the resurrection of Christ, attested to by some five -hundred individuals (according to the apostle Paul in 1 Cor. 15)  is a real event by necessity, that must be grounded in historical fact ("If Christ be not raised, then your faith is in vain"-1 Cor. 15:17) . 

This is perhaps the root of why so many non-Christians think of Christianity as judgmental and narrow-minded.  It is not that the nature of the belief is automatically condemning or damning to those on the outside, but Christianity makes specific truth-claims that cannot co-exist with the tenets of other belief systems.   Granted there are plenty of Christians who are condemning, but the Spirit of Christ's message is the proclamation of the Good News, free salvation to "whosoever will", rather than the message of hell fire to those not subscribing to a doctrinal point of view.