...in this holiday season, as I wind down from a sugar high from baking cookies all day Saturday, I started to reflect on all sorts of things and my mind wandered to a time when I once visited a friend's church (when I was in college) and afterward became engaged in conversation with this individual about our two faiths.

When it came right down to almost an argument I stopped and made a simple statement. 'Your God and my God are the same, aren't they? It's just our prophets that differ, and who are we to question which prophet is wrong?' That stopped my friend in his fervor, and he pondered that statement for a moment. He nodded and agreed, and we went back to whatever errand it was we were originally on, which escapes me at the moment.

That conversation just popped back into my head, surprisingly and with absolute clarity, and I decided to share it here. It's important to remember, at this time of year with all the stores promoting Christmas and the news stories about schools and towns who are banning all sorts of ambiguous commercial items that could be construed as Christian only items, the reason why we're here.

Now, writing this as a Catholic (but not a very active one), I'm trying to be as non-biased and general as possible, so please forgive me this.

We're here because God put us here. He made us in his image. I'm not entirely positive, but I think that's the core belief in all the religions. Please do correct me if I'm wrong on this assumption. He instilled us with creativity, free will, and a functioning brain. With free will comes vast responsibility. Some have turned away from God; some were never raised to believe in Him; some have never left His faith, and some have found their way back to Him.

With imagination, there are stories and fables and accounts of times long past about the descendents of the religions. Each with their own perspective, each with their own language. These scribes were our prophets - the people who gave us the stories of the origins of our faiths. With all the strife and hate in the world, there is still religion and still wars about religious beliefs.

When you stop to think about it, however, isn't it silly? After all, there is but one God - for any faith. He may be called by many names, but how could there be more than one powerful individual, for lack of more accurate terminology, that created the universe that is? It is all up to interpretation when dealing with the story of creation, and that goes back to those scribes.

Who are we, mere individual people, to question and debate the honesty and accuracy of these scribes (also mere people) who lived centuries ago? It is all a matter of interpretation, and not one is right or wrong.

They are simply different.

That's something to keep in mind as the calendar year comes to a close. I'm not trying to preach or get you to convert your way of thinking to mind, but to simply realize if you have not already, that each religion, each prophet, has a different perspective. It's just like watching a car accident, and having 8 people in different directions watching it happen - they all saw something different, and none of them are 100% right, or a 100% wrong and they are all equal. Applying that to the many faiths that are out there - they all saw something different. They all wrote something different, and they wrote it from their perspective of the situation.

No one, no matter how fervent you are about your religion, is 100% right, and none are 100% wrong. There's no variance as to who is more right or more wrong either. They are all equal, just like the observers in the car accident example. You may not agree with someone else's beliefs, but that doesn't make them wrong, or make yours any more right.

It's just a little something to think about as some major religious holidays are surrounding us, as the year comes to a close, and is something to remember when next you get into a debate about religious beliefs.