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I said earlier somewhere that diversity is a necessity in our current society. Religion can no longer be as isolationist or as myopic cosmically as it once was. The rampant decline in church membership is ample evidence that such practices aren't faring well. But I think that one can be reared within a particular religious framework and still have an understanding that spiritual formation can legitimately occur in other frameworks.
I don't think that "dogmatic rules" are universal or necessarily important in religion. They certainly aren't in mine. And they certainly have no place in the general endeavor of spiritual formation. Yes, spiritual disciplines are necessary to good spiritual formation, with the caveat that such disciplines liberate and do not hinder the practitioner.
But there's a difference. The acts have value, but at a more basic level, it's the acts, themselves, that seek to espouse, encourage, inculcate and foster an awareness of our own worth, especially as that worth relates to others and to the universe. In other words: the chief aim of religion is to instill worth. Just as I claimed.
Could be that those religions are simply the ones that are populated by the most confused and damaged people to begin with, though.
I didn't say I would. What I said was that religious beliefs are structures for enabling spiritual formation. But any general religious structure -- Xy, Islam, Judaism, Buddhism, etc. -- can be used to enable spiritual formation just as readily as any other.
If you don't know what it means, then you don't really have any business in this argument.
If I see someone being murdered, the fact that I can't prove it doesn't matter in the slightest. To assert this is to make the statement "it is a fact" essentially meaningless. It is to assert that what is true, what is factual, depends on our ability to demonstrate it to other observers. Thus, in the absence of cognizers capable of "proofs" truth doesn't exist. Facts don't exist. What is a fact becomes not only contingent upon an individual both observing it in some sense but also whether they can demonstrate it in some nebulous way (you haven't defined what you mean by proof in any formal way and have claimed you have proved things despite convincing, it appears, no one but yourself which would seem to indicate that you are subjectively determining what qualifies as proof on a case by case basis). Perhaps if you defined "prove" more formally then you've have a more usable definition. As is, you've erased any meaning from fact and relied entirely on your subjective and self-defeating "definition" (self-defeating because you haven't proved it sufficiently for anybody but you, the person who believed it to begin with, and thus either proof is meaningless and this renders all facts as meaningless to, or you can't prove it and it isn't therefore a fact according to your definition).
Except in this case, Christine's answer contains a number of errors that have already been addressed by numerous posters, and ironically, errors that are subsequently repeated by still other posters.