Islam vs Christianity re Evils in OT

[Belinda]

But the logical takeaway from the fact that which religion the vast majority of believers subscribe to (excluding you, by your own description) has nothing to do with the particulars of said religion, rather it's random luck as to the particular religion of their parents.

We have to distinguish between the textual representation of a religion and its deeper nature as an abstract object.

First of all, there is no single textual representation possible of an abstract object. This issue is also known as Benacerraf's identification problem. Therefore, it is not necessarily the particulars of a religion that truly matter. These can be different, but in the end, these particulars may still belong to the same abstract object, up to isomorphism.

In my opinion, all religions that are closed under logical consequence are largely equivalent.

In structuralist terms, Christianity is different from all other religions, however, and in a very negative way, because it has a centralized church that actively prevents its doctrine from being closed under logical consequence:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magisterium

The magisterium of the Catholic Church is the church's authority or office to give authentic interpretation of the word of God, "whether in its written form or in the form of Tradition".[1][2][3] According to the 1992 Catechism of the Catholic Church, the task of interpretation is vested uniquely in the Pope and the bishops,[4] though the concept has a complex history of development.

The other Christian churches inherited the unsound structure of Christian doctrine as an abstract object from the Catholic Church. The construction of Christian doctrine, i.e. its interpretation, has always been fundamentally unsound. Over time, Christianity has accumulated so much unsound material that its doctrine has become unusable beyond repair:

Martin Luther, 1521: I do not accept the authority of the popes and councils, for they have contradicted each other.

In terms of Tarski's semantic theory of truth, Christianity is a theory without a model. Christianity does not proceed by means of logical consequence -- it simply does not support that -- but by means of continuous re-axiomatization of inconsistent and outright contradictory tenets and pragmas leading to the accumulation of an increasing amount of nonsense.

No other religion does that.

It may not necessarily be possible to prove that the other religions are not one and the same abstract object. They actually might be. They could actually be one and the same thing, represented in different ways. Christianity, however, cannot possibly be the representation of that common abstract object. In that sense, Christianity is probably not even a religion.

It's a little hilarious that you correctly point out most folks don't care a whit about any of the details about religions, since they just end up believing what their parents do, but when asked about your thoughts on that topic, you try to bring up the very details that you just implied that few care about.

Lucky's argument promotes insight into our own motivations, a very Good Thing, as objective insight gives us more scope for choice.

May Godelian not be an exception to the rule that few people care? Agree with Godelian or not, Godelian obviously does care.