I understand; of course the religions mentioned are examples. Just last Sunday I heard a preacher say that without the Holy Spirit we would not even be Christians, we would not be able to keep the faith at all. The thing is that billions of non-Christian believers do. Their faith is sustained also by reading holy books or visiting religious gatherings or praying, as is ours. I'm trying to find the difference here. And if there is none, then is this statement true: God works faith in us?
I think the answer may lie with the meaning of faith. Billions of people buy into one belief-system or other strictly on the basis of them liking it or finding it plausible. We are not speaking of that kind of thing. Faith, as we know, is not simply acceptance, but it is a mystical bond between God and Man that exhibits itself in a lifestyle change, trust in the Almighty, etc. etc.
So if faith is more than belief, the intervention of the Holy Spirit makes sense. Elsewise, there would be little reason to accept as true the Bible accounts. But...one might say at this point, there are people who believe the most bizarre and unscientific things. Many cults, for instance. So the improbability of the storyline that defines the religion cannot be the test of whether faith is involved or not.
Except that it is relatively few people who are in that category. With the world religions you have referred to, we are speaking of the proof being in the religious pudding, as it were.
I said that I am not conversant enough with Hinduism to comment much on it, but when it comes to Islam, Buddhism, Shinto, Confucianism, and maybe a few others, we are barely speaking of religions in the Christian sense at all.
Islam is as much a political and social way of life as it is a religion, and most of its religious concepts are borrowed from Judaism or Christianity or a pre-existing Arab paganism anyway. Buddhism, and all the rest of the religions of the East, are essentially absent a God as we know God. It is not as though they follow a competing god. These are more like philosophies that explain the meaning of life, but are not essentially theistic.
And then this: which is the faith that has won the world? In spite of recent gains by Islam, there are far more Christians, the religion is growing even in the face of new persecutions, and it is the only faith that can be seen as universal in any practical sense of the word. And all of this is true despite it being the one most oriented towards transcendence or supernatural truth of all of them.
