True or false: there is a chance that every religion could be right.

This means that, in this one universe (no parallel universes allowed), all religions in the history of mankind are compatible with each other, there is no belief in one that is mutually exclusive of another.

True or false: there is a chance that every religion could be wrong.

Pretty self-explanatory, I think. Again, same rules apply, this universe only, religions known to mankind at this point only apply, no guessing on what might happen in the future.

Finally, in your opinion, true or false: the chance that any one random person's religion might be right is approximately equal to the chance that same person assigns to other religions being right.

In other words, a devout Christian might have chosen the correct religion, the most accurate, however you want to state it, and as such, they believe the chance of other religions being correct is some value X. In fact, that value X is actually the chance that they picked the right religion, or in most cases was born to the right religion. (Again, "right" meaning it is accurate and factually correct from an objective point of view, regardless of our current inability to prove it as such)

I would need some clarification on the question. Suppose there is a God and that He has some expectations about our behavior. But suppose also that every religion has some element of those expectations incorrect. For example, he does not really care about meat on Fridays or pork consumption or playing poker. But on the other hand He does care about murder, adultery, etc. Would you consider Judaism incorrect? They got the pork thing wrong but had some of the other elements right. How about Catholicism? Wiffed on Fridays meat but again had some other things right.

So basically if there is a God, then every theistic religion has got that right. That is the basic question and if correct than every such religion is in some sense "right". Of course, religions differ on various details of their doctrine so that it would appear that they cannot all be correct in every element. So if they have to be perfect in every detail it is hard to argue that they could all be "right".

The problem I think is that the issue is more complicated than your question allows. Sort of like asking if a photon passes through one slit or two slits if it approaches a two slit diffraction grating.

I'll have a go at it.

1) Assuming all religious beliefs are accurate as they are now (that is, if the Christian God exists, current Christians "have it right" when it comes to what they believe, if the Muslim God exists, current Muslims "have it right", etc.) then, false. Clearly some religions claim they're exclusively right.

2) True. There's a chance all religions could be wrong.

3) Basically false, although it depends on your definition of "approximately" I guess. Some religions are vague enough or old enough that they're essentially unfalsifiable (such as Christianity or Hinduism) whereas others are new enough that the foundations of them are still testable and clearly bull**** (such as Scientology). This would cause me to put them in different categories of how likely they are to be true or false.

I can't disprove that Jesus rose from the dead. I don't think he did and I don't think it's my job as a non-believer to prove my non-belief, but if I set out to provide tangible proof that Christianity (or Islam, or Hinduism, etc.) was, without a doubt, false,it would be an extremely difficult and likely impossible task.

If you asked me to disprove Scientology, I could do so with ease to the satisfaction of nearly all readers.

That one is certainly the most open to interpretation and value judgments, as it were. So leaving it open to the question answerer is the intended effect.

You mean every monotheistic religion, I assume? Because polytheists would be pretty pink-cheeked if they were proven wrong.

The point of asking about all religions is to remember that there have not always been three main monotheistic religions known to man.

Actually I intentionally did not limit it to monotheistic religions.

It might depend on the flavor of polytheism.

For example, I won't claim to be an expert but from my reading I don't think the Hindu understanding of Divinity is entirely incompatible with a Christian understanding of God, although neither are they identical. Hinduism has often been called "polytheistic" but I think it's mostly a misunderstanding, or at least an attempt to apply western logical categories where they don't quite exactly fit. There is at least a homeomorphic equivalence between Brahman and the Christian notion of God

Since Hinduism is usually the standard example of a polytheistic religion, I felt like it was worth mentioning.

One specific religion rejects all Gods but one (or several), while the atheist rejects all Gods. It seems to me that by this logic of assigning value to different Gods, the atheist suffers the same problem of probabilities than any one religion does. You're not exempt from the probability of these Gods existing, simply by rejecting all of them.

The probability of any of these religions being right is not affected by your belief of them, and should be evaluated on practical factors. The probability of there being a Sun God, is the same whether your reject all other Gods or reject all other Gods but one.

I agree. Perhaps using the word "god" in the OP was misleading and I should have opted for "deity" instead.

1) Seems like this must be false if we can find one irreconcilable incompatibility between two different religions. Christians believe Jesus was the son of God, Muslims don't. So, all the religions can't simultaneously be right.

2) True. If everything we think we know could be wrong, then yes, all the religions could be wrong.

3) Don't get this question. The random person can only have one religion according to your question. Surely, the more chance of being right that person assigns to a religion that isn't theirs, the more the chance they're assigning to their own religion being right goes down, unless they think some or all of the religions might be right in which case they probably don't meet your 'belief in one religion' criteria.

1) False, others have said why. It seems so obviously false perhaps I am misunderstanding the question though.

2) True (again this seems too obvious though)

3) I think I'm very likely misunderstanding here but false because plenty of religious people would say X=0. But in general I don't see why the probability of a given religion being 'right' would be affected by how strongly people believe or disbelieve in it.

It depends on what being “right” means.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perennial_philosophy
Perennialism is a perspective within the philosophy of religion which views each of the world’s religious traditions as sharing a single, universal truth on which foundation all religious knowledge and doctrine has grown. According to this view, each world religion, including but not limited to Christianity, Islam, Judaism, Hinduism, Taoism, Confucianism, Shinto, Sikhism, and Buddhism, is an interpretation of this universal truth adapted to cater for the psychological, intellectual, and social needs of a given culture of a given period of history. The universal truth which lives at heart of each religion has been rediscovered in each epoch by saints, sages, prophets, and philosophers. These include not only the 'founders' of the world's great religions but also gifted and inspired mystics, theologians, and preachers who have revived already existing religions when they had fallen into empty platitudes and hollow ceremonialism.[3]

Perennialists argue that although the sacred scriptures of the world religions are undeniably diverse and often superficially oppose each other, one can discern a common doctrine regarding the ultimate purpose of human life. Typically this doctrine is posited as mystical insofar as it views the summum bonum of human life as an experiential union with the supreme being (sometimes perceived as an "energy" such as the universe) which can only be achieved by undertaking a programme of physical and mental 'purification' or 'improvement'.[citation needed]

Perennialism may be contrasted with conventional religious orthodoxy, which demarcates clear lines of truth and falsehood separating religions, and also with historicism, which sees religious phenomena as determined by sociopolitical context with no absolute essence.

So if we’re talking about soteriology for instance, then they could all "be right" in that if you adhere to a particular religion’s beliefs and follow its proscribed practices, you’ll reach the promised land.

Perennealism sounds interesting, but it sounds more like a Deist philosophy than Theist, and wouldn't that then make it kinda irrelevant to a question with regard to religions being right or wrong? Or at least, isn't it in a way saying that all the religions are actually wrong, not right, because there's this universal truth at the heart of all of them that they're not acknowledging? or perhaps aren't even aware of?

I've been using 'right' in the context of the OP questions to mean 'correct in everything they believe'.

1. False
2. True
3. Incoherent
The first two are not debatable. The third is too silly to debate.

I'm doubtful you could find a single serious person who agrees with this claim. I'm also guessing that you are trying to ask for people's views on multicultural or postmodernist views of religion. If so, the question above doesn't correctly describe the view in question (these views of religion generally reject the idea that a religion being "right" meaning that the beliefs of that religion are true in the traditional sense of true).

Pretty much the same.

False. I think some religions are more likely to be false than others..

I'm surprised by this. I can imagine someone comparing Scientology with Christianity and guffawing at how blatantly false Scientology is by comparison but how would you actually show that? Is it not possible that after millennia of being wrong, we finally stumbled on the truth, as ridiculous as it seems? (No more ridiculous in my view than the major religions)

Plus, I thought that the question was actually asking something else entirely.

Backing up a bit, why can’t I say ‘Jesus is God’ is true for Christians, and ‘Jesus is not God’ is true for Muslims?

You can say that? By that I mean that they're not inconsistent. However, both of them can't be right.

Maybe look into "The Perennial Philosophy" or "Perennial Tradition". Many of the world's traditions share the same fundamental truths. You will NOT find them displayed in the exoteric religious side of things though. You do however find the same truths spoken in many of the esoteric, mystical factions of various religions. From my experience, a list would include Christianity, Sufi Islam, Hinduism, Taoism, Hermetics, Alchemy, Gnosticism, Plato and probably Buddhism and maybe Judaism.

"For what is now called the Christian religion existed even among the ancients and was not lacking from the beginning of the human race until 'Christ came in the flesh'. From that time, true religion, which already existed, began to be called christian." --"church father" St Augustine (426 AD)

In a nutshell, the primary of the fundamental truths in regards to mankind is that man's essential nature is Divine and that man may experience a re-entry into the unitive state by a dying to self and a rebirth into a Higher Consciousness.

I will, thanks, but I've been discussing this in the context of the OP and whilst some or most of the religions might share some universal truth, that isn't the same as them all being right in everything that they believe.

Even were I inclined to seek a 'god', I think that the discrepancies in the details between the religions, and the fact that some, most or even all of them might be wrong on many issues other than some universal truth that they might all be right about, would prevent me from becoming a theist. I'm really not sure how people commit to one religion over another whilst declaring it 'true', rather than saying something along the lines of them simply preferring it.

The exoteric religions that we see in the world today conflict in everything they espouse. None of them really represent the One True God. The individuals who have sought and found and experienced the Divine Source can be termed mystical and esoteric. And while they maybe used scriptures from the various traditions in their quest, they did not find God by following today's religious doctrines.

Who says you have to go through a religion to seek the Divine?

There could be one God that presents himself in different ways to different groups of people.

I think it’s more that from delimited perspectives one person may describe a cylinder as a circle, while another as a rectangle. So while neither description is wholly right, neither is wholly wrong either. At the end of the day, the “universal truth” Perennialists are talking about is ineffable and lies beyond conceptual elaboration, anyway. So whatever we say about ‘It’ won’t be about ‘It’ but rather our subjective, relative and limited view of ‘It’.

Or even in different ways to the same individuals. Or there could be multiple gods.

Like I said, you'd think that would put people off from committing to one belief system, yet it doesn't seem to on a grand scale. What does that say about us?


Not me. That's why Perennialism sounds more like a form of Deism to me.