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Originally Posted by acousticrock87
Well first of all, you have to realize that if someone tells you that a faith like Christianity is "soothing," there is a severe lack of understanding somewhere. In order to believe in a heaven, you have to believe in a hell. Jokes aside, hell is one of the scariest possibilities imaginable. Even if you believe you're going to heaven, the thought of others going to hell cancels out any form of comfort contained in the religion. Religion is not soothing by any means, unless you choose to manipulate it like that.
The other thing is, I know what you're saying about people claiming to know the one true religion. For one person to say "you're wrong, I'm right" is pressumptuous and unconfirmable. However, someone is right. Not two different beliefs can be correct. You can have a belief that everything is correct, or that two beliefs are correct (as long as they don't contradict, which is difficult), but you cannot believe that one person who believes in Islam and disbelieves Hinduism, another person who believes Hinduism and disbelieves Islam, and a third person who has picked and chosen different areas in each to believe or disbelieve, are all correct. They may all be plausable, but either one is correct, or they're all wrong. We can discover one that makes a lot of sense relative to the others, we just can't know for sure.
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Also, people who believe they will go to heaven after they die may or may not be perturbed by the idea of others going to hell. They might have freinds who do not share their faith who they may beleive will go to Hell for not accepting Christ or whatever the reason. This could make them very uncomfortable. I know if
my friends would go to a horrible torturous pit of despair and darkness for all eternity while I'm sitting up on a nice, warm puffy cloud would rip my heart in twain. But then again, what if we knew Hitler, Mussolini, Jeffrey Dahmer, Saddam Hussein, Kim Jong Il, Osama Bin Laden and all these other disgustingly evil and hateful, violent people were to go to hell, it make us all feel a lot better. So the theories of who would go to hell and who would go to heaven really don't mean a whole lot to most people. Most people believe that if you are kind and good natured (no matter what faith you may belong to) and you live your life properly (according to our human laws rather than the religious scriptures) you will be rewarded in the afterlife. It is only a minority of fanatically religious people who blindly think that their faith is the one true faith and that all other people will go to hell if they don't accept this "one true faith".