Login
Theme: Light Dark

Why doesn't God show Himself and declare to all human kind that He is the true God, so there will be no more religious conflict?

Tagged:

Home - Quora Link

Leaving aside the practical issues of God doing that, namely that that destroys the whole reason He made the world like this in the first place, where we have to find God and not the other way around, it really wouldn’t solve anything, much less the problem of religious conflict.

The amount of conflict in the world that can be traced to religious reasons is very, very small. This is because religious conflict is really just thinly veiled political conflict.

Think about what it means for a second to be fighting over religion. People do things for reasons, and the justifications they have for those reasons have to make sense on some level. If we were living in a tribe of, say 30 people, and tribe tradition held that our tribe worshipped Willow the War Wolf, and you managed to get 10 of the tribe to agree that we really should be worshipping Lemmi the Love Lion instead, is this a religious or a political dispute?

It might look on the surface like a religious dispute, but everyone involved will know that you really just want to run things. The process of you convincing these people that they should overthrow tribal customs are going to revolve around appealing to their selfish natures.

And so the conflict is going to get adjudicated through political dynamics. The leader of the tribe will accuse you of spreading heresy and false gods, You’ll get on your stump and make your case for upending tribal tradition, and the 10 people you’ve managed to get in your corner will cheer and maybe make their own cases too.

It’s a political conflict that’s only nominally religious. If you look at the religious conflicts you’ve seen throughout history, you’ll see exactly this sort of blending. Where the conflict spills over into the martial realm and people actually take up arms and fight, those dynamics are, again, largely political.

This is because when you have a real argument over something religious, fighting about it is just about the last thing that’s ever going to solve the problem. You fight when you’ve run yourself out of options.

That said, let’s take the scenario at face value. God appears in the material world and declares He’s the real, one and true God, and tells everyone to stop fighting over Him. What does that actually do, what question about God does that actually answer?

People’s spiritualities and religions reflect their environments. The reason Islam and the Koran seem the way they are to Westerners is because Islam was born in the desert. Judaism and Christianity came from the same bunch of farmers. This is people’s cultures, their lives. God appearing in the flesh and saying that Christianity is the right way, specifically this one kind of Christianity, isn’t going to just magically make people in the Middle East super peaceful.

And besides, God actually being here isn’t going to make humans any less prone to sinning against Him, as the story of Adam and Eve illustrated. God was physically present with Adam as He had Adam name the animals of the Earth. Yet Adam still allowed Eve and the serpent to tempt him.

Sure, Genesis is allegory, but you use allegory to drive towards full truth. And even if Genesis is ‘mere’ allegory, the gospels aren’t. Jesus was a real person that walked the Earth, and He was God. Jesus stated in as strong of terms as He could have possibly stated them in, that He had the real key to God, He was right about that, and people listened. Now most people in the world know that story.

Knowing that God was here and announced the right ways to live hasn’t and won’t ever stop conflict from festering in the hearts of men.