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Originally Posted by filtherton
I don't know how many religions existed in or around Greece at 340BC. It isn't all that relevant to what I said. Presently there are over 1500 different denominations of Christianity alone. Perhaps Epicurus' mistake was lacking the foresight to see that more diverse perspectives would arise (or already existed).
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There is a reason that the word "religion" is not the same as "denomination". Most denominations are the same. All of the sermons in my father's Lutheran Church could be told in a Methodist church, Baptist church, Episcopal, Evangelical, etc. If you put the word "Pope" in now and again, they could even be preached in Catholic churches. They all read the same book, and even interpret 99.9% of the book the same. That's not diversity; it's stubbornness.
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Originally Posted by filtherton
In any case, his assumptions about the nature of god aren't necessarily reflected across the whole of theism. An omnipotent being might have a slightly different concept of benevolence than humanity.
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They don't apply to non-deistic religion, like Buddhism, but they apply to Judaism, Christianity, Islam, and Hinduism. That's about 70% of the population of the planet. And 14% are atheistic or non-religious. So let's examine the 15% left: Buddhists (covered them), Sikhs (probably not covered by Epicurus), Baha'is (monotheistic, in basically the same boat as Islam)... you see where I'm going with this.
Epicurus's wonderful feat of logic doesn't apply to, well, about 6% of the Earth's population. That's about 360,000,000. Of course, you have to then ask yourself whether Buddhism is a religion or philosophy, so it could be less than 1%.