The phenomenon (viz., religions proclaiming themselves to be absolute authorities) occurs in almost every religion I can think of.
Muhammad is considered to be Messenger of God, as is Bahá′u’lláh. A history of Mormon beliefs regarding Joseph Smith shows the same decline from worldly authority to ethical authority.
Perhaps the only religion I can think of that almost doesn’t do this is Buddhism. One has to take refuge in the three treasures together because one can be mistaken about what any one of them actually means.
As far as dis-provability is concerned, all major religions seem to consist of two pieces:
a claim regarding ‘the ultimate truth’ regarding reality (usually focused on the afterlife) which is by definition inaccessible and non-disprovable
a set of guidelines for life, usually claimed as originating from ‘the ultimate truth’, but still testable in reality
If you extract the ideas of karma and rebirth from Buddhism, I’d still consider those two topics a religion which is non-disprovable… while what is left of Buddhism looks more like a testable philosophy on life.
I’m not saying that testing a religion’s philosophy is easy but, as it should have an impact on reality, it is in theory testable. At the very least it is open to comparison to other philosophies and consideration regarding the consequences. As Christianity and Judaism shows, the religion itself survives when some of the non-religious content is disproven.
The phenomenon (viz., religions proclaiming themselves to be absolute authorities) occurs in almost every religion I can think of.
Muhammad is considered to be Messenger of God, as is Bahá′u’lláh. A history of Mormon beliefs regarding Joseph Smith shows the same decline from worldly authority to ethical authority.
Perhaps the only religion I can think of that almost doesn’t do this is Buddhism. One has to take refuge in the three treasures together because one can be mistaken about what any one of them actually means.
As far as dis-provability is concerned, all major religions seem to consist of two pieces:
a claim regarding ‘the ultimate truth’ regarding reality (usually focused on the afterlife) which is by definition inaccessible and non-disprovable
a set of guidelines for life, usually claimed as originating from ‘the ultimate truth’, but still testable in reality
If you extract the ideas of karma and rebirth from Buddhism, I’d still consider those two topics a religion which is non-disprovable… while what is left of Buddhism looks more like a testable philosophy on life.
I’m not saying that testing a religion’s philosophy is easy but, as it should have an impact on reality, it is in theory testable. At the very least it is open to comparison to other philosophies and consideration regarding the consequences. As Christianity and Judaism shows, the religion itself survives when some of the non-religious content is disproven.