What interests me is the indoctrination of religion in children. Christian indoctrination is dying out in the UK in primary schools (faith schools excluded) when I was there around 15 years a go prayers, hymns, and the nativity play were all part of school life. We were never taught about Christ but we were expected to understand and believe in him.
Now at that moment in time when I was young and desired forgiveness for things I had done I thought were bad, I didn't feel the call to Islam, Sikhism, Judaism but to the Jesus of Christianity because that's what I knew. The unknown did not reach out to me, if it had I undoubtedly would still believe today.
I think that is why people are so adamant they are on the correct path to god because the majority of time they have grown up with a religion, and there is no escaping that. The thought of another god, or in the Abrahamic sense the same with different prophets is unthinkable.
They can both argue with positive belief they are correct because they choose to believe the religion of their country, culture, family or upbringing.
Exceptions exist, I know. Take for example Christians in Pakistan, depending upon which source you read (the statistics vary) Christians make up 1.8 percent of the dominant Islamic country. Pakistan is known as one of the more conservative Muslim countries. There is a general feeling that Pakistan does not allow for religious freedom yet churches exist and are functioning in Pakistan.
According to Wikipedia most descend from people who converted during British colonial era.
But these exceptions don't out way the obvious, that the god you worship is the one that the people around you worship. The two biggest religions Christianity and Islam are physically demonstrable on a map via the east/west divide. Geography plays its part in religion how is this explained from a theological point of view?
Anyone ever hear any testimonies of people who had been saved by a god they had never heard of before?
In July 2012 a fourteen minute video entitled Innocence of Muslims (Nakoula:2012) was uploaded to YouTube. The relatively low-budget film was poorly dubbed in Arabic with what were regarded as anti-Islamic slurs, causing a global controversy resulting in the death of 75 people. It also prompted a wide variety of responses from different governments; Pakistani minister Ghulam Ahmad Bilour offered a reward for the death of the film’s producer and the American Government requested YouTube assess whether the video could be removed from their site. Critics noted that the video was constructed to be inflammatory that it emphasised that films are ‘still associated with an idea- the idea of America’s global power and prestige’ (Guardian, 2010). Ironically, across the Atlantic the Westboro Baptist church continued to use the funerals (and subsequent news coverage) of soldiers that died fighting in wars against a religiously motivated force in the Middle East as a platform to promote homophobia and their fundamentalist beliefs. What I found interesting was it appeared that an ideological war was being waged using the media and it had a lot to do with religion.
