Kung Fu just ain't enough

In the mid nineties the Ultimate Fighting Championship began. It was an attempt to bring practitioners from many different martial arts together to see which art was the best. Its been going for over ten years now. I watched the first couple ones the other night again. They were funny. The video production sucked by today's standards. The funniest part though was the crazy assumption that each practitioner made in the first couple. They were sure, as their instructors had told them, that their martial art was the best. What they quickly learned was that none of them had the slightest idea what to do if they found themselves wrestling on the ground except for Royce Gracie, a Brazilian. They saw that they were all lacking the ability to fight on the ground. At the next couple UFCs you saw people coming back having trained in wrestling of one kind or another. Now that the UFCs are in the 50s it is now accepted that none of the martial arts was the best but that some thing new called mixed martial arts is what works. I remember back in those beginning days of the UFC I trained with a boxing coach who also noted the short sightedness of every martial art and how an amalgum of the best of each was actually the best course of training. He at that time made the jump that he believed the same was true of religion. At the time I had disagreed. My martial art of evangelical protestant christianity was the best and would beat all others. I think I would respond differently to him today. First, Each martial art was created in a certain culture and society in which it made sense and worked. That clearly, as the UFCs have shown, a martial art can't be picked up out of one culture and dropped into another with different locales, economies, mores, & culture and expect it to see the same level of effectiveness. What the UFCs taught us was their was a thread of true fighting that was sown through each art. It could be found in each but its totality could not be found in any of them. Modern religion, to me seems the same. Each religion pitted itself against all the others and stated that it would defeat all the others. In reality a thread of truth ran through each but none contained the totality of truth. That isn't to say that we need to mix a little of each, but to say we so embraced the metaphor of war in regard to our beliefs that we forgot that christianity is at its heart humble and gracious. Accepting and applauding truth wherever we see it, not having to disprove it to make ourselves more true. I'm not arguing that we should "water" down our faith but that we should center our faith around what is truest about God, his son, and the other role models he shows us. They are all humble and gracious to a fault. They do not wrestle "opponents" into submission, rather they cease to see opponents and see even those who would pit themselves against us as our neighbors who we choose to care for and be concerned about. I argue that we should center our beliefs around ideals like humility and grace, which bind our faith together and bind us to others, and not cold historical facts that are as meaningless and ugly as a disembodied hand is from the body to which it belongs.