38,000

Thirty Eight Thousand. That's how many denominations of Christians there are in the world today: thirtyeight thousand (38,000)

I ran across this little factiod as I was looking on Wikipedia for a list of Christian denominations. You can see the wiki article here.

I can't remember why I was looking up that information. I got rather side tracked by that rather large number: thirtyeight thousand. I was expecting somewhere in the neighborhood of thirty to fifty not a number one thousand times larger than that.

And all of this got me to thinking and wondering.

That's 38,000 different interpretations of the same text.

How would one know which is the "right" interpretation?

What happens if one chooses the "wrong" interpretation?

Widening that thought out to encompass all of the religions of the world, how would one know that one's religion was the "right" one?

Is it possible that the reason there are so many different religions in the world is to suit the many different personalities of humans so that the individual follows the doctrine that works the best for them?

And isn't it really ridiculous to argue over which way is "right" and which way is "wrong"?