What gets me down the most is when I DO try to speak with religious people from within their own frame of reference. But introduce a discussion about the council of Nicea, and they argue that God would have worked through all those bickering priests to make sure his word came through correctly. Same argument if you try to introduce alternate views on Christianity from Gnostic texts or the Apocrypha or whatever else. And again the same argument when you show them comparisons between the wording in original scriptures and the modern translations used today, or introduce the argument of context and word-meaning, or pretty-much anything else.
The Christians, (and Muslims, it must be added) that I have tried to talk to PURELY from a theological and historical standpoint have ONE response, one undeniable argument: That whatever translation or version of the holy scripture they follow is TODAY the word of God, that he has made so. Every other translation, every other version, past or present, is wrong. For whatever it is worth, I find that the limited interaction I've had with Buddhists and traditional Hindus tend to be more open and "inclusive", for lack of a better word.
Middle ground is there to be found between the religious and the secular, but if the religious do not even accept their own rich histories and traditions, how can one meet them halfway?
~Simone.
