Be Groovy - Jesus

A common and inaccurate idea of religions popular among secularists is that "all religion is basically the same."

This is an unfortunately pervasive argument for how intensely wrong it is. The failure to understand the dramatic differences between religions stems mostly from a misunderstanding of the significance of their differences.

Secularists look at differences like "Jews believe the messiah has not yet arrived," and "Christians believe Jesus is the messiah" and consider them to be unimportant little details, while looking at common themes between religions, like a general sense that we should be decent people, as the "real meat." The basic fact of the matter is that this is entirely backward - the exact opposite is true.

The beliefs of a religion in regards to their theology is actually the most important aspect. Many untrained secularists and atheists view religion as "we think we should be generally good people because of x or y thing" and that the end result of "being generally good" is the point of the religion. This error is caused by a failure to understand that religion is not a preference or something you pick based on how you feel about politics or various lifestyles, but rather as an interpretation of what the truth of reality is.

I don't believe Jesus is God and died for our sins because I think it sounds nice and that it's a good reason to be a good person, but rather because it is the truth of the world. I really believe it happened. When another religion disagrees with Christianity on this point, they are not simply nitpicking insignificant differences, but insisting on a different reality entirely. Jews do not think Jesus is the messiah. This is a really really significant difference. The entire course of reality as we understand it changes if Jesus is not the messiah.

These differences are like thinking that believing the earth is round and believing the earth is flat are basically the same because both people believe the earth is a cool place to live. Many religions agree on a general "golden rule" mentality, which is not at all a reason to believe that "all religions are mostly the same" considering it is one similar thing among thousands of differences. This is like believing puppies and mushrooms are basically the same because they are both carbon based life forms. The differences vastly outnumber the similarities.

This attempt to pool all religions together begins to look purposefully dishonest, or at the very least intellectually insincere, when we dive even slightly deeper and see that "being generally good" isn't even the actual prescription in most of these religions. People take the "religions are basically all the same" mistake and one up it, circulating bad memes and false information that all religions' core idea is "be good to others."

Generally, "be kind" isn't the most important "commandment" (whatever they may be called in each text) in any religion. So even if religions generally have a "be groovy" vibe to them, this tends to come in second (or third, or further) to something else that is more important.