The contingency of religions.

The often heard arguments that one religion is better and more peaceful than another religion are useless and without sense. For it can be argued that there is no religion in itself to defend or to criticize, only adherents. Instead it must be clarified what religion actually is. However, it is certain that it is an accident that there are the religions that exist. It is an accident that the religions are the way they are. It is an accident that the religions are geographically spread as they are spread. It is accidentally that the adherents of the different religions behave as they do.

All kinds of example of how these circumstances could have been different can be imagined. However, it must be observed, that it is not necessary to refer to the science of history in order to illuminate this coincidence. For these circumstances are accidental simply because they might conceivably have been different. It is impossible to justify a complete determinism that can contradict this. Thus, there is no religion in itself, only persons’ religiosity, i.e. persons’ acquire certain sentences that are worded by other persons. A religion without adherents is thus not-existing.

This means that if the adherents of a religion act in an objectionable way, it has no sense to defend the religion in question by adducing that it is pure and innocent, but that its adherents just do not act in accordance with it. For the same reason, it has no purpose to criticize any religion in favour of any other. Contrary to this, individuals can be criticized for wanting to attribute special virtues to a certain religion, just as persons can be criticized for choosing their religion as their starting point, as all religions are semantic senseless sign sequences.

On the stated grounds of principles, the critics must limit their criticism to possible actual religious persons’ certain acts and statements, which is something else. For as it has appeared, there is no necessary correlation, not anything that not could very easily have been different. It is nearly the same with political parties, only with the difference that political statements can have a linguistic meaning whose content can be immediately discussed.

Contrary to this, it can be argued that religious sentences do not have such a sense, but just borrow an appearance of semantic meaning from not-religious words such as “belief” and “salvation” in their not-religious senses. Unwarranted use of these words induces the religious persons to put forward sentences that are semantically senseless and thus qualify to be neither logically nor empirically investigated. For the same reason, they cannot be a starting point of any argumentation. Therefore, the religious persons’ acts and statements must be due to influence of not-religious circumstances.

Of course, the above-mentioned misapprehensions do not hinder the religious persons themselves in thinking that they can draw conclusions from their religion. These conclusions can even have a linguistic meaning seen in isolation. However they cannot be justified on the basis of the religious persons’ meaningless sentences.