Back before I had heard of the Internet, in my religion class, I opened up my grade 12 (4th year) world religions textbook and read a figure that astonished me; that there were 80,000 world religions!

How could this be? I had only heard of 4 or 5 up to that point. 80,000??? Seriously???

That was the moment that started the seed of doubt about religion.

I thought to myself "the only reason why I believed in Christianity was because of the family I was born into. If I had been born into a family of another religion, that's the religion I'd believe in, and Jesus wouldn't mean anything to me."

I've since read that there are 30,000 variations of Christianity alone. If god wanted us to know how to live, why didn't he make it a little clearer?

The other thing I deduced was that humanity must have an obsession with making things up. All of those religions can't be true; most of them must be made up. And according to most religions, they believe that theirs is the only true religion, therefore 79,999 must have been made up.

What does the number 80,000 world religions mean to you?

I'm not sure when you were in school, but let's say that the human population was only about 4 billion at the time (that would put your schooling in the mid 1970s or so -- if it's later, it only makes my argument stronger). With 80,000 religions, you're talking about 50,000 people per religion if evenly distributed. If humanity was obsessed with making things up, wouldn't the ratio of people to religions be something larger than 50,000 to 1? But if you consider the actual distribution, it would seem that if humanity was really obsessed with making stuff up, we wouldn't have the bulk of people on the planet claiming adherence to a very small subset of those 80,000 religions.

I don't think your deduction here is particularly sensible. (Edit: A more sensible deduction is that humans like to follow what other humans around them are doing. And this is supportable by all sorts of social science observations.)

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Genetic_fallacy


Genesis 3:

When man cut himself off from the source of true knowledge he was left trying to explain everything by his own abilities. Result: 80,000 - 1 wrong explanations.

More importantly, how does one know that their religion is the right one without having tried the remaining 79 999 religions? The usual answer: because I speak to God, or because God has revealed himself to me. If so, then why is it that a Muslim person is less likely to speak to Jesus, while a Christian is less likely to speak to Allah? Why is it that they both don't talk to Jesus?

Can someone dumb this down to a college dropout please

Whether a statement is true or false is independent of the source of the statement. Applied here, the truth or falsity of Christianity is independent of whether one's parents were Christians.

Aaron's answer is good. Here's an example:

If you were born into a family that believes 2+2=4, and they taught you that 2+2=4, would that make it false that 2+2=4?

No it doesn't make it false, but it does make it FAR MORE LIKELY to be false if there are 80 000 different interpretations in the world regarding what 2+2 =

No, it doesn't. It doesn't speak to the probability of truth at all. It only addresses one's grounds for belief.

It doesn't have to (nor did I intentionally imply it does) speak to the probability of truth. Basic logic does that for me.

Yes, you're right - I think you're admitting the genetic fallacy, correct?

As to the 80,000, my Genesis quote addresses that.

It's not a fallacy if you're speaking about the 'probability of truth', which I believe the OP was doing.

Quoting the Bible to defend the beliefs it perpetuates is a bit like quoting a serial rapist in order to defend the act of rape. I can't seem to see the fallacy there, can you?

Ok, then I withdraw your correctness.

Rot. And I'm quoting the Bible to explain an observation. Which it does. Perfectly rationally.

According to this logic, if I create a new religion right now called "Stupid-interpretations-of-probability-ism" then I change the probability that any other religion is true by the mere fact that I created this religion.

Yes, but only if your interpretation meets the criteria to be classified as a 'religion' among the 80 000 (or however many official religions) that already exist. I severely doubt you can recruit the numbers to make the above into a religion however, as I'm sure atheists have tried to do so already.

E.g., some people worship new-age medicine but this doesn't necessarily make it a religion.

This brings me to a related point. I've been seriously considering starting a religion. Great tax ride-off and a LOT of money to be made. It nicely suits my rather sociopathic disposition. Exploit the weak, why not?

http://www.charismamag.com/spirit/ev...iims-see-jesus

How do you explain those that speak to Allah? They can't be mistaken, because according to the logic of most Christians, personal experience > evidence.

What would make Christianity more likely to be true than the Stupid-interpretations-of-probability-ism" religion?

Personality-wise, if you met someone who told you that the one and only true way to ride a bicycle is his way and that every other way ever conceived is inferior, what would you think of this individual?

My question from this is - are illusions of grandeur - and - narcissism - necessary for one to believe in 1 of 80 000 possible religions (most of which are mutually exclusive)?

Not that it has much of a systematical bearing on the argument derived from these numbers, but:

You're probably not aware of it, but most of these christian denominations hold very close to exactly the same theological beliefs. Differences that can lead to a new denomination can be as simple and 'irrelevant' as a different monther tongue, differences in rituals/customs etc. To exemplify: While the # of christian denominations has been estimated as high as 34000, this would include some few handful of catholic denominations - which are part of a unified creed by definition. The differences among these denominations are purely "non-essential", so to speak, and don't imply that "we don't know who's got it right".

World religion is actually a more-or-less defined term. There are varying counts, ranging from about 8 (you didn't, perchance, just add a number of 0's in your memory?) to 20 or so, but certainly not 80000.

Furthermore, while it's fairly difficult to estimate, wiki pegs the # of different religions at around 4200.

To figure that one out, you would only need to examine the implicit assumptions.

Then it's unfortunate that people gravitate to the religion of their parents rather than evaluate all the religions and choose on merit. Some religious people try to claim they do this but I'm not falling for that BS - they ALL come to conclude that the religion of their parents is the correct one.

Sure, tell that to a convert.

This is blatently untrue. I know of one example in my life where they dont believe the relgion of their parents is the correct one. So you may want to change that ALL to MOST

Someone commits the genetic fallacy when they say an idea is false because of its origin or history (assuming its history is actually relevant to its truth). They do not commit this fallacy when they realize that they believe some idea because of some unrelated arbitrary aspect of their own history. So, being born to Christian as opposed to Hindu parents is an arbitrary aspect of a person's history and doesn't make either Hinduism or Christianity more likely to be true.