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But I'd better think twice when millions of people around the world start claiming that they have interaction with aliens. And I would think three times if many of these "fanatics" were willing to face mockery, persecution, and even death for their testimony. After all, not to many people would pay the ultimate price for a lie.

Well, not quite around the world. You will notice that particular religions are rather geographically clustered, and that, for example, Christianity was spread through human effort of missionaries. I know of no traces of personal 'contact' with Christian God by pre-Columbus Americans. Religions appear, grow, spread through some region, stagnate, be supplanted by others, die. And they are, by their very nature, mutualy exclusive. So, the only logical explanation is that they are all (or, if we want to be logical nitpicks, all but possibly one) social artifacts in the first place.

I don't want to offend anyone, but this genuinelly puzzles me:

If one 'talks with God', one is usually categorised in one of three groups:
  • If the God in case is 'ours', the person in question is deeply religious
  • If it is some other established religion's God, especially one prevalent in countries we are at odds with at the moment, the guy is a religious fanatic or something similar
  • If nobody ever heard of the God in question, the chap has nice chances of ending up in a psychiatric institution

    And yet, I don't see any difference.

    So, the question for those believers who are ready to grant legitimacy to religions other than their own: doesn't the first Commadment require exclusivity (and other religions have someting similar)? For others: what makes your particular religion more, for lack of a better word, probable (or true) than others?
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