by John Devera

Created on: January 25, 2009

There is one right religion. . .for you. A religion is a codified and established belief system built around a benevolent creator God. In the search for the one right religion, and especially the one right religious denomination, there are five facets of religion that should influence our choice of a religion. In this sense, even atheism or humanism count as religions, since atheism is a belief system built around the categorical denial of a benevolent creator God, and humanism attempts to establish that mankind is that universal and central figure that creates meaning in the universe.

The five facets of religious belief are faith, revelation, scripture, reason and tradition. Now the primary introduction to religion, and the single most valuable first tool to use in discovering the right religion, should be scripture. But in the end analysis, scripture may not be the most important feature to you in finding the one right religion.

SCRIPTURE

Every religion has a core scripture at its center. Christianity has the New Testament, Judaism has the Torah, atheism has a physics textbook, ore perhaps Chrisopher Hitchen's God is Not Great. The most sensible way of deciding if you have discovered the true religion is to evaluate the Truth of its foundational beliefs, and the only way to do that is through analysis of its scripture.

REVELATION

Many religions base their fundamental reality on the presence of a personal revelation to the believer. A member of the Church of Christ of Latter Day Saints (commonly referred to as the Mormon Church), is told explicitly that this revelation is a proof of the reality of God, and comes in a burning in the heart as one contemplates the teaching of The Pearl of Great Price or The Book of Mormon. My father, a holy rolling Pentecostal, for instance, regularly felt that God spoke to him in revelatory messages. Revelation may be of prime importance to you in discovering the true religion.

TRADITION

It is easy to dismiss tradition as unimportant in discovering a right religion, but that would be short-sighted and dismissive. Tradition implies that a belief haws not only weathered the storms of controversy and heresy over time, but also that these practices were effective and efficient. Now, of course the old joke about how many Methodists does it take to change a light bulb still haunts our thinking. It takes thirty. One to change the bulb and twenty-nine to talk about how the old one was better. You see, tradition means that a practice or belief

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