Why cannot I believe in other religions as a Christian?

There is an exclusivity about the Christian religion, properly understood, for which many Christians do not apologize.

The "founder" of the Christian religion is Christ, of course, and the claims he made about himself as recorded in the Bible leave little doubt that he considered himself to be the sine qua non of all true religion. He made seemingly outrageous statements such as,

I am the way, the truth, and the life. No one comes to [God] the Father, except through me (John 14:6).

Jesus, unlike the founders of all the other religions in the world, did not claim to be a person who could point the way to God; he claimed to BE the way, and the only way to God. Defenders of Christ throughout history have challenged non-Christ followers to decide if Jesus was

• A liar (Not likely, since even his enemies know that he was an honest and forthright individual who attracted loyal-to-the-death disciples because he always told the truth.)

• A lunatic (So much good has been done in the world in the name and for the sake of Jesus Christ that even to entertain the notion that a lunatic could inspire people not only to establish hospitals, schools, orphanages, and a host of other good works designed to serve needy people worldwide, is risible!)

• A legend (The historicity of the New Testament--the "second half" of the Bible--makes this possibility an impossibility. There is as much (and perhaps more!) historical proof for the existence of Jesus of Nazareth (Nazareth was his "hometown" in the region of Galilee in the north part of the country of Israel) as there is for perhaps any other personage from history you would care to name.)

Or

• The Truth personified.

One of Jesus' apostles framed a similar thought in 1 Timothy 2:4-6,

For there is one God and one mediator between God and mankind, the man Christ Jesus, who gave himself as a ransom for all people. This has now been witnessed to at the proper time.

As for the existence of "other gods," the reason why Jews and Christians believe in only one true God is because that belief is mandated by God Himself in such Bible passages as Exodus 20:1-6,

And God spoke all these words: “I am the Lord your God, who brought you out of Egypt, out of the land of slavery. “You shall have no other gods before me. “You shall not make for yourself an image in the form of anything in heaven above or on the earth beneath or in the waters below. You shall not bow down to them or worship them; for I, the Lord your God, am a jealous God, punishing the children for the sin of the parents to the third and fourth generation of those who hate me, but showing love to a thousand generations of those who love me and keep my commandments.

The decision to "convert" from the Hindu faith to the Christian faith is obviously a very big decision for you, fraught with all sorts of conflicting emotions. There are only two ways (of which I am aware) of converting to the Christian faith:

1. Converting on a purely intellectual level, giving lip service to the idea that Christ is the only way to God.

Or,

2. Converting holistically--spirit, soul, and body--to the Christian faith through what many Christians believe is the only true way of being converted; namely, through the new birth (technical word: regeneration), which requires a special intervention, if you will, on God's part (though we enter into the process with an initial step of faith, which God actually provides to the sincere-of-heart). See Jesus' words in the Gospel of John, Chapter 3, which he spoke to a very religious man who was not born again (or regenerated).

If a person of a faith which is as radically different from Christianity as Hinduism is wants to marry a Christian, a crucial question needs to be asked and answered: "Is the person I want to marry a nominal Christian (i.e., a Christian in name only, via socialization only) or a Christian by regeneration (i.e., by the new birth)?"

If the answer is yes to the former part of the question, then the implications of the Hindu's "conversion" to Christianity need only be relatively inconsequential, since nominal--not radical--followers of virtually any world religion can, in a sense, get along just fine. [Having said this, however, I realize that if people from two different religions become married, the problem of "what to raise the kids"--Hindu or Christian, for example--can be very problematic, indeed!]

If the answer to the latter part of the question is yes, then the Hindu's conversion to Christianity is a completely different matter entirely. How can a Hindu who believes in many gods believe in his or her innermost heart in the One True God (in Exodus-20 fashion)?

In conclusion, to many true (not nominal) Christians throughout the world, the exclusivity of their faith is not attributable to an ideology of man's making, but a theology of God's making, as revealed initially through the Judeo-Christian Scriptures, but ultimately in a living, breathing human being: Jesus Christ, the God-Man.

Are true Christians narrow-minded? Yes, in some things they are, and sometimes offensively (and unnecessarily!) so. The same can be said, however, of many followers of the world's religions.

As to their belief in Christ as "the way, the truth, and the life," however, Christians are required to be as narrow-minded as Christ seemed to be in his pronouncements concerning his identity as God's one and only Son, besides whom and before whom there is no other god, according to him and the Judeo-Christian Scriptures.