Decidely Biased Rejection of Religions

When I, as a Christian, claim that other ideologies are not true, it comes from the critique of all religion, including my own, inherent within my religious grammar. The historical event of Jesus Christ crucified for human sin is also the theological claim of God's self-giving love, even when it hurts. But not only so, Jesus' death by the political and religious leaders is God's judgment upon all political and religious violence, indeed the rhetorical violence that the Christian gospel aims at its opponents at least claims to perform this violence against ideologies that lead to material violence, not against human persons. (see Ephesians 6 for Paul's parody of worldly weapons and their incapacity to free human persons from their slavery to moral deadness, his solution is the weapon of the Christian gospel, the word of God, because Christian warfare is not against flesh and blood...not violence against persons)

So when the Christian gospel says, "reject ideologies and forsake your allegiances for the resurrected Jesus," it does so to call human persons out of violence, but it cannot do this without speaking to individuals. In other words, because the Christian gospel is addressed to all peoples, its critique of religion cannot simply be dismissive, but must avoid category mistakes because religious adherents are all people, and must be spoken to and loved as people, which is precisely what the resurrected Jesus demands of his adherents.

Category Mistakes: Christianity as a Religion and Marxism as a Sociology

To place a course of [literary] theory alongside a course on moon symbolism in D.H. Lawrence is to commit what the philosophers would call a category mistake. It would be like studying Marxism as one variant of sociology, rather than grasping that Marxism is a critique of the vary concept of sociology. - Terry Eagleton, Literary Theory: An Introduction Anniversary Edition, viii.

I would also add that to reject any religion as of a piece rather than as a particularity of history is a category mistake.  Every religion has its own grammar or semiotic structures for describing reality, and many of them are culturally conditioned.  What we commonly call religions are based upon historical or metaphysical claims of various sorts, and have their own criterion for judging the truthfulness of those claims.  On top of that many religions claim adherents from many cultures and linguistic groups decidely different from that religion's place of origin.  So, to claim on the basis of one's own reasoning that all religions are equally false, equally dangerous, and have equal qualities is at least slightly foolish, if not imperialistic. 

At least when religious adherents claim that one religion is untrue it is on the basis of their own decidely biased point of view.  When many people make sweeping claims about religion(s) they claim to come from a scientific, western, unbiased, sociological point of view.  The problem is that this claim to be unbiased betrays a dishonest prejudicial preference towards human autonomy.  So, to reject a particular religion on the basis of unbiased reason as being dismetrically opposed to some frightening spector called "religion" is a category mistake.