Why do the people rage and imagine vain things? Every God-Of-Creation based religion purports to explain the creation of our universe. And each religion define behaviors they believe are dictated by the God of their religion. All God-Of-Creation based religions claim unconditional knowledge of The Creator, by whatever name they call Him, and definitive knowledge of The Creator's laws, regulations, policies, by-laws, and procedures for every human behavior imaginable.
Religious laws include, but are not limited to: what to wear and when to wear it; when to dance and where, why, or what dance is forbidden; what to eat, when to eat it, how to kill it, how to cook it, and how to eat it; who to hate and why to hate them; when to pray, where to pray, how to pray, and how many times to pray; who to kill and why we must kill them. They have included rituals of human sacrifice--especially of virgin women and children--, rules for the treatment of male and female slaves, and tolerance and justification for men who forced women to serve as sexual slaves and concubines.
How then, with a myriad of diverging and conflicting behavioral standards , often bordering on if not steeped in, minutia, can any group --Jew, Catholic, Baptist and other evangelical Protestant, Episcopal, Methodists, and a myriad of others, including charismatic churches, Eastern religions, and cults of all kind-- be so utterly confident that their religion is the only one God approves of and accepts?
So why do the people rage and imagine vain things?
Any group that validates its religious doctrine on the basis of faith commits a grave fallacy of logical argument. The fervent belief and practice of a religion based on faith merely validates that one is willing to believe without proof what one has already decided to believe. Correspondingly, attempts to validate one's religious beliefs on the fervency of that belief most assuredly begs the question.
If fervent fanaticism for a religious beliefs were the prerequisite for the validation of a religious truth, then many Christian Members of the faith must take a back seat to what some Christians call fanatics, zealots, and cultists. It might be safe to say that there are many Christians who would kill for their religious beliefs, but there are a much smaller number who would die for them. So,the people rage... But, does God demand or advocate either?... and imagine vain things.
Religion should not be something for which humans have to kill or die. Religion should empower humans to maximize the human capacity to have communion with and share Symbiotic Intimacy with our God-Of-Creation and facilitate human efforts to free ourselves from the Anxiety of Mortal Being and all the bastard progenies the Anxiety of Mortal Being begets.
Confronted with the infallible logic of unadorned human history, we are compelled to surmise that the reality of humanity in this form of our existence obfuscates any potentials for absolute truth for every question every religion purports to answer. Why, then, do the people rage and imagine vain things?
As it were, the practice of arrogantly subscribing to the premise that the only religion acceptable to God, and to Jesus Christ if you are Christian, is the one to which a particular people subscribe is not only arrogant, it is also insane. But why would religious arrogance and religious insanity be appealing to a rational intelligent omnipotent God?
Unfortunately, control of human behavior for the purpose of social constraints and political and economic domination permeates much of what passes for theology. And not enough of it is infused with behaviors that enable us to pass the experimental trials of our Experimenting Symbiotic God.
So, whatever your religious belief: Jew, Catholic, Baptist, other evangelical Protestant, Episcopal, or Methodist if we share Symbiotic Intimacy with our Creator and with ourselves in the absence of religious superiority and religious intolerance, which would prevent it, we likely will pass the experimental trials of our Symbiotic God. For the rest of humanity, He has no need.
Selah.