Divine Revelation and the path to monotheism

Happy New Year everyone! I haven't posted in several days so I thought I'd give it a go.

Looking over my posts I noticed that I have barely touched on why I chose Christianity as opposed to some other religion. It certainly did not happen over night. In fact for several months there was this period where I merely manifested a vague assent to the existence of some supernatural entity. This did not last long because it left so many loose ends and I was still quite curious, so I did a little of religion shopping.

Two things I want to make clear though: (1) I am not an expert in world religions. Whatever I say about them is from my own experiences, perceptions, amateur knowledge, and brief interactions. (2) "Choosing" a religion might not be the best way to describe the process. It is difficult to articulate properly, but the mental "choosing" is only half of it. In reality, God chose me as much as I chose him. The work was 50/50. Again, it is difficult to properly articulate how this works because it is ultimately part of the Mystery of God. I remember going to the first RCIA (Rite of Christian Initian for Adults) meeting and thinking "Wow, this is quite uncomfortable, and I'm far from being totally convinced. I should probably just quit and practice my own private spirituality. It can't be all that different, right?" Yet, for some reason I kept coming back. Ultimately, I think becoming Catholic for me was a combination of exercising my own free will and divine intervention. Many of the other Catechumens in my group also described a similar feeling when we finally got baptized.

One of my starting points in my "search" for a religion was the necessity of divine revelation. For me, "God" as a concept was very intuitive (as it is for most people), but also quite difficult to explain accurately, much less completely. But the basics were there; I knew that God established and reigned over the Mysteries of life: the meaning of life, moral behavior, beauty, creativity, and comprehension. I was aware of the need to fill these categories, but I was also aware of how much human philosophy disagrees over them. People on their own cannot comprehend God; we need help. God is so much higher in a metaphysical sense that most of the information about Him would have to come from Him. It is true of most any form of creation. Most of the information a dog has about people comes from people trying to plant that information inside the dog's head. A dog without a person's intervention would know very little about people and even less about how to please them. This relationship holds true in the hierarchy of being, so God would have to tell us about Himself. Thus, I concluded the necessity for divine revelation. I also figured that God was a personal God, because if He weren't, there would be little reason for caring about Him even if you knew He existed. In other words, it came fairly intuitively that God would at least have some interest in us. The combination of the necessity for divine revelation and the quasi-corollary that God was a personal God left me confidently rejecting pantheism (such as several varieties of Hinduism) and the vague "spiritual philosophy" religions of the East like Buddhism and Confucianism.

As a final note, anyone interested in a deeper treatment of comparative religions and the uniqueness of Christianity, I suggest reading books by Dr. Peter Kreeft who is a Catholic professor of philosophy at Boston College and has a remarkable knowledge of world religions.