The Perfect Religion is of Universal Law

My previous post explaining my theology on Christianity has gotten quite of a responses, specifically from Orthodox Christians and Muslims. The conversation I found quite enlightening was my conversation with a Muslim name Ahmed. We talked about a few things such as, “what is the Trinity?”, but perhaps what made him stop responding to me is the idea of universal truth.

If there is one true God, His/Her/Its laws must be universal and transcend all cultures.

Universal Truth vs. Relative Truth

There are two types of truths: truth that is universal and truth that is relevant only to certain circumstances/people/etc. An example of a universal truth is science — laws that apply though out the entire universe is universal. An example of a relative truth is something that only applies to you — Chinese food causes stomach aches.

I do not take much credence to most of the Bible except the words of Jesus because most of the Bible consists of relative truths. The Old Testament was written about and for the Jewish people, of which I am not. Much of the later New Testament are letters to specific churches or people. Although we should analyze and understand these books, you must realize that these truths are relative and analyze them in the proper context.

To understand these books, you must analyze, amongst other things, their intent, circumstance, and audience:

1. To whom are these books written to?
2. When and where were they written?
3. What was their intention in writing this book?

Analyze each step, then try to apply the relative truth to you, but do not apply a relative truth directed to someone else to yourself verbatim. These are different times and we are now different people.

Jesus shifts God’s Message from relative to universal

Until Jesus arrived to Earth, God only spoke to the Jewish people. Thus, you could consider most of the laws relative. But Jesus changed the entire dynamic. He brought a universal law — the Golden Rule — and shared it with both the Jews and the gentiles. Almost all cultures have their version of the Golden Rule, which makes it universal.

We could consider the Golden Rule a universal law because it transcends culture–cultures around the world and across time have converged upon the Golden Rule, essentially making it a universal truth. Christianity is the only religion that I know of that has made the Golden Rule the sole requirement to salvation. This is something I can believe in.

What makes the Golden Rule so fascinating to me is that it’s a universal truth about relative truths: the rule is to understand that another person’s truth is relative and different than yours.