Multitudinous Religions
One of the things I liked about baseball when I was a kid was that I thought it was a complete meritocracy. An oasis of utter fairness in an unfair world. Boy was I naive.
I recall arguing with my dad about it.
"If someone is hitting .282 in Triple A, he'll be brought up before someone hitting .280! A manager won't go against the statistics!"
After all, that would be irrational. I hope I was very young when I said that. At least I wasn't cynical. But I was certainly "insufficiently nuanced" when it came to understanding that a baseball player was more than his batting average.
But even if batting averages were all that mattered, Dad insisted there was some cronyism in the game, some of that "it's who you know" disease, and that came as a complete surprise. Of course the fact that if you were black you couldn't play in the big leagues until 1947 should've been a huge clue.
Then I recall being shocked yet again that even science - that bastion of supposed objectivity - has to rely on mistaken scientists to die, not to be proven wrong, in order for the scientific world to move forward. (Don't take my word for it - Max Planck said it.)
So this is prelude to saying that it should be no surprise that where there is so much disagreement on what we can see that there will be loads of disagreement on that which we cannot see. Which explains why there are so many religions. I was watching O'Reilly's show last night and he tried to be fair to Scientologists, which was painful to these ears.
Ultimately if there's unity to be found among Christians (for which we can have legitimate hope due to the power of Christ's name) it's obvious it will take supernatural help. But since grace builds on nature we can't eschew apologetics and history and all the things which persuade some. Today's saint, Justin Martyr, was certainly a hero in that regard.
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