Recker's World
Reason 6
All other religions contain genuine believers too
When I was 9 years old, I made friends with a kid from a different religion. Peter lived just down the road from me. They were a Hindu family. I hung out with Peter regularly and we got on fine, but it was a new experience to be friends with someone who believed in some other god/gods.
How could anyone believe in another God apart from the god of the bible? After all, it says in the bible there is only one god and the only way to get to that god is through Jesus Christ. So what was Peter and his family worshipping?
As a Christian, I was taught it was one of two possibilities: Either the god was non-existent or they were worshipping Satan who was masquerading as another god in an attempt to lure people away from the one true god.
At the time I didn’t really care that Peter believed in a different god to me and my parents had no problems with me hanging out with him. It wasn’t until later I believed that god’s like the Hindu ones were false ones and that people who believed in them were manipulated by Satan. However, I also knew that my friend Peter was a really lovely guy who showed no signs of being manipulated by the devil.
Nevertheless, the bible teaches these things and the bible can’t be wrong. Hindus, like any other religion are being misled by Satan, lured away from Jesus.
It would be a long time before I fully grasped that not everybody thought the same and that the bible was completely wrong when it says that we are without excuse when it comes to believing in the existence of God.
The bible tells us if we don’t accept Jesus that we are, rebellious, foolish and all other manner of insults. The bible writers think everyone should think like them and that adequate proof for them is adequate proof for everyone else, but in reality, it’s not, because everyone is different, everyone has different backgrounds and everyone looks at things from different perspectives and mindsets.
That boy at school was just one of those people who saw things from a different perspective. Peter was yet another, except that he had been indoctrinated to believe in Hindu gods and saw them as the real ones.
Other people from other religious are, in most cases, genuine believers who really truly believe their gods are good and that they are doing the right thing. If anyone is going to try to say the devil is deceiving them, then they also need to consider that the devil could be deceiving them too and it could be another religion that has it right.
