Very good! That's a very good explanation of a perfectly reasonable reason that so many man-made religions exist.
Of, course, nothing in this post applies to a (necessarily single) religion derived from the revelations of God Himself.
You may find it satisfactory to come up with a (very good) explanation for all the false (i.e. man made) religions. You still have to deal with that one exception, which no amount of human reasoning can explain away.
So, now you are back to square one. Deciding whether there are exactly zero or one such Revealed religion. One really doesn't want to get that result wrong.
Thank you for your feedback stan! I'm not really sure that I followed everything you said but what I wrote isn't meant to go against the idea of religion and god(s) in general. I just think that our perception of religion is wrong or biaised and maybe I will try to write some reflexions about gods. Maybe everything is just figment of all our combined imaginations and we're living in a cloud, consensus of all our consciousness?
There are a lot of valid maybes.
My only point is that one of them is that there is a Creator who revealed the truth to men.
If He did, then we should diligently work to find out what that revelation was.
It's an interesting question indeed :)
My contention is that the Bible was authored long after the event and explains little about the true nature of the universe. I also suspect that no amount of reason will ever change the minds of those that believe in God and I certainly am not going to move from my position by being told that I don't want to receive (whatever that's supposed to mean). I'm out.
So, stan, God revealed the Truth but didn't bother to explain it or did we forget the revelation? So glad I'm an atheist, this is all too confusing to me
I contend that the Bible contains several millennia of such detailed explanation and that people of all intellectual levels are able to grasp it sufficiently to get the Creator's main message. Being an atheist is only a good thing if God didn't really do that.
I contend that that atheists are just people who don't want to receive such a message, and therefore self-select for the inevitable outcome of not receiving it.
"He who has ears to hear, let him hear."