Question about religious dogma

[dtbog]

To those who practice any sort of dogmatic ritual for any organized religion:

- how would you feel if you discovered that the religious text on which you base your ritual had in fact been corrupted, mistranslated, or misunderstood?

You might argue along the lines of "well, forget the text itself... this ritual has been in my faith for <amount of time>! We must be observing it properly!"

... but suppose that this misinterpretation or error had been made by the earliest followers of your faith! Suppose that the simple transposition of two individual characters of an ancient language has now caused your ritual practice to feature a religious official (priest, rabbi, whatever)... when it was intended to be conducted in the presence of an oak tree instead.

A little silly, maybe -- but some of these faiths also include punishments for those who do not follow the proper rituals. Are we therefore to assume that your God would be punishing generations and generations of His religious followers because one of His earliest and most influential disciples simply couldn't read very well?

I therefore pose the following questions:

- how certain are you that 100% of dogmatic rituals you practice are being carried out in their intended form?

- if your answer is less than 100% certain, what do you think are the consequences of this fact?

[J. Stew]

My religion says to pee out of my ears. Are you saying that this could be wrong? Since I can't pee out of my ears yet, I can't be certain I'm not going to hell. Crap.

[sweetjazz]

Many Christians are aware that the Bible has been corrupted, mistranslated, and misunderstood many times throughout history and realize that the same might still be true today. They realize this and it does not really bother them.

I think your question is sort of liking asking how would you feel if you found out that Ed Miller's starting hand charts were found to contain some -EV plays (perhaps calling when raising or folding is better, or folding when calling is better). A poker player would say that poker is too complex to be captured by a simple set of rules and that the real value of Ed's book is to get you to think about poker (more specifically, low limit hold 'em) in a better way.

For a lot of religious people, that is the value of dogmatic rituals and religious texts. The rituals and texts have value because they result in a deeper spiritual understanding and, so they believe, a closer relationship to God.

(Of course, some people have more fundamentalist beliefs. But that's not a knock on serious religion anymore than people who play hold 'em by using starting hand charts "religiously" are a knock on serious poker players.)

This is meant to be a serious reply and I hope it is helpful.