What does this great worldwide variety of religious devotion indicate? That for thousands of years mankind has a spiritual need and yearning. Man has lived with his trials and burdens, his doubts and questions, including the enigma of death. Religious feelings have been expressed in many different ways as people have turned to God or their gods, seeking blessing and solace. Religion also tries to address the great questions; Why are we here? Where did we come from? What does the future hold?

As a consequence we usually follow the religious ideals of our parents, religion has become a matter of tradition and more often than not where we are born. In many countries now, through immigration and population movement, people of different religions share the same neighbourhood. Which you would hope would lead to meaningful conversation of faiths rather than hatred!

Certainly world history must give us pause and make us wonder what role religion has played in the many wars that have devastated mankind and caused untold suffering. The Crusades, the Inquisition, the conflicts in Northern Ireland, clashes between India and Pakistan, and the many conflicts in the Middle East.

So how did many of these religions begin? In almost every religion, we can find a central figure to whom the credit is given for establishing the ‘true faith’. Some of these were iconoclastic reformers, others were moralistic philosophers, some myth and folk heroes. What they said and did and the writings they left behind was embellished and formed the religion.

The expansion of scientific knowledge called into question many of the religious teachings. All of a sudden, God and religion seemed outdated to many. The severest blow was no doubt, the theory of evolution. In 1859 Charles Darwin, published the ‘Origin of Species’ and presented a direct challenge to creation and the teachings of religion.

If there was no God, then life must have started spontaneously by chance. For life to have come about, somehow the right chemicals would have to have come together in the right quantities under the right temperature and maintained for the correct length of time. For life to have begun these chance events would have to be repeated thousand of times. Evolutionists call this the ‘big bang’ but even they, admit the probability of atoms and molecules falling into place to create one simple protein is 1 followed by 113 zeros.

So I think order and design not only in the universe but in creatures that interact with one another and the environment would lead to a creator. Almost every part of our human body, the brain, the eye, the hand, shows design so intricate that science can’t explain and also the intelligent design of the water-cycle, photosynthesis in plants, the amazement of a fertilized egg and the beauty of birth.

So I suggest there is a God… but it leads to the question; Does one God want all religions to worship in different ways or one way?

If it is one way, which is the right way…….