The grotesque random slaughter of innocent people, including young children, in
the name of Islam, in Britain, France and Afghanistan by Muslim fanatics, and
the equally grotesque murders of innocent Norwegians by the Christian fanatic,
Anders Breivik a few years ago are the results not of Islam or Christianity;
they are the result of faith.They are the result of people arrogating for themselves the right to determine who can live and who should die, based on nothing but faith and the belief faith gives them certain knowledge of what a god wants, who it wants to punish - and that it requires their help in meting out that punishment.
It would be easy to condemn the deluded, simple-minded fools who carried out these acts as 'evil'; as representative of an inherently 'evil' religion or the products of inherently evil cultures, but that would be missing the point entirely.
The problem is not Islam; the problem is not Christianity. The problem is faith.
Faith is a fallacy.
Faith serves no useful purpose. It serves only to rationalise holding irrational beliefs; to make the faithful satisfied with not knowing and left pretending to themselves and others that they know things they do not know. In the absence of any substantive evidence for the physical existence of gods, the last (and often only) resort of a believer is faith. With evidence, faith would be unnecessary.
Faith is the resort of fools and frauds. Faith is pretending to know things you do not know.
There is actually very little attempt in the Qur’an to explain what faith actually is or why it should be regarded as trumping evidence. It is taken for granted that ‘Allah’ exists and faith is spelled out merely in terms of a Muslim’s obligations and expressions of confidence in what ‘Allah’ will do. Simply believing makes this all true, apparently.
Just as a Christian will claim that the Bible proves the existence of God because God wrote or inspired the Bible, so a Muslim will claim the Qur’an proves Allah exists because Allah inspired the Qur’an. The circularity in that reasoning is readily seen by the obvious fact that the claims cannot both be true, but if one claim fails then the other claim also fails because the failure is in the logic of the argument. In fact, this was never a real argument in the first place because both of them rely on two unsubstantiated assertions – this particular god exists and this god inspired the book.
The logical fallacy is in the presupposition of the conclusion. The logic collapses if you change this assumption and replace ‘God’ or ‘Allah’ for ‘Bottle of Milk’ or ‘Peanut Butter Sandwich’. This becomes just as absurd to a believer as the holy book ‘proof of gods’ does to a non-believer and yet the ‘logic’, such as it is, remains unchanged.
Here's how one Islamic apologist site (IslamWeb.net) tries to explain it:
The basis of any religion is faith. Faith is not merely conviction of the truth of a given principle, but it is essentially the acceptance of a principle as a basis for action. Without faith, a man is like a car without a steering wheel, drifting aimlessly upon a sea of doubt and confusion.
This is, of course, exactly what someone with no evidence, but a dogma to push, would say. It tells us what faith is not, and then makes a claim which any non-believer, indeed I suspect any non-Muslim, will tell you, is nothing more than an unfounded assertion, the entire purpose of which appears to be to reinforce in-group smug self-satisfaction. An almost gleeful revelling in how much better the believer thinks his or her life is compared to those less fortunate fools.
What is faith in Islam? It is belief in the Unity of God or Tawheed. This is expressed in the primary Kalimah (Word) of Islam as: “Laa ilaaha illallaah", meaning: “There is no one worthy of worship but Allah.”
This beautiful phrase is the bedrock of Islam, its foundation and its essence. It is the expression of this belief, which differentiates a true Muslim from an unbeliever, or one who associates others with God in His Divinity.
This is merely a statement of dogma, entirely dependent on preconceptions about the existence of a particular god with particular qualities. There is no special beauty in the phrase itself, merely in the comfort it brings to believers as confirmation of bias. If there is intrinsic beauty in the phrase, try spotting the intrinsic beauty in the phrase, “There is no one worthy of worship but Thor!” Is there intrinsic beauty and power in that phrase sufficient to form the ‘bedrock’ of a new religion?
There is no attempt to explain how faith gains this special insight. Faith is simply the acceptance of dogma. “I believe because I believe… and because I believe, what I believe is beautiful and true without question!” This is the self-referential certainty of the smugly self-satisfied.
The acceptance or denial of this phrase produces a world of difference among human beings. The believer finds out the right path, knows the truth and chalks out the course of life in the light of reality; the unbeliever chases one illusion after the other and gropes into the dark. For the believers, there is the promise of unhampered progress and resounding success in this world and in the Hereafter; whereas failure and ignominy are ultimately the lot of those who refuse to believe in it.
Again, these are merely assertions which to an outsider are patently false and which are nothing more than appeals to existing biases, intended to reinforce in-group versus out-group self-satisfaction and contentment.
The Bible is not much help in understanding how this faith thing is supposed to work either.
The entire 11th chapter of St Paul’s Epistle to the Hebrews is about faith, but it only starts off with a nebulous ‘definition’, and then has a lot of claims about what people have done through faith, all of them from the Old Testament and none of them demonstrably true. One might have expected some more contemporary examples but apparently Paul, or whoever wrote Hebrews, did not know of any.
Now faith is the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen.
For by it the elders obtained a good report. Through faith we understand that the worlds were framed by the word of God, so that things which are seen were not made of things which do appear.
By faith Abel offered unto God a more excellent sacrifice than Cain, by which he obtained witness that he was righteous, God testifying of his gifts: and by it he being dead yet speaketh. By faith Enoch was translated that he should not see death; and was not found, because God had translated him: for before his translation he had this testimony, that he pleased God.
But without faith it is impossible to please him: for he that cometh to God must believe that he is, and that he is a rewarder of them that diligently seek him.
Hebrews 11:1-6
The nebulous platitude in the first verse is trotted out ad nauseum by Christians but it means absolutely nothing as a practical definition. It might as well read; ’Now faith is pretending to know things you do not know’. What exactly is this ‘substance of things hoped for’? What on earth is the ‘evidence of things not seen’? How do we know what these invisible things are, to be able to say with any degree of certainty that this or that is the evidence for them? This is something pretending to be deep that is not even shallow. As a piece of philosophy it would not deserve to be pinned up behind a bar. Why not be honest and say faith is just wishful thinking and the pretence of knowledge?
Hebrews 1:1 would have been far more honest, and might have served humanity better if it had read, "Now faith is the triumph of ignorance over knowledge; the triumph of certainty over truth and an abdication of personal responsibility." But of course the author was not writing truth but propaganda. The author was providing slogans to be used in place of rational thought
The problem is faith.
But that's not the whole problem.
The problem is also those who tell the faithful that faith is a virtue; that's it's a character flaw - a sin even - NOT to have faith. The problem is also the ever-so-moderate Imam, no doubt bosom pals with the local rabbi, the local Anglican parson, Catholic priest, Baptist pastor and the local Sikh granthi, who, along with his pals, tells his congregation what a great thing faith is, and how, by faith, they know with complete certainty that all other faiths are wrong.
The problem is also with bishops and archbishops; with the monarch and heir to the throne, and the Prime Minister who all proclaim faith to be the greatest of virtues.
The problem is that, by 'faith', God's holy words in God's holy books DO tell the faithful what God wants and who God wants punished and how to punish them, and by 'faith' there is no way to tell which are the good, moderate, socially responsible, caring and loving things that God wants, from the extreme, antisocial, hateful things that God wants. By faith alone it is impossible to tell right from wrong because, by definition anything and everything God wants is 'right'. Ever-so-moderate Christian apologists like William Lane Craig, for example, can divine meaning in the Bible that makes infanticide and genocide not only good things but moral imperatives, mandatory on all good Christians, when God wants them!
Moderates, by proclaiming faith to be a virtue and God's word as great, empower and permit the extremists. By telling them that there is an afterlife; that this life is merely a preparation for something infinitely better if they just do what God wants; the life is a cage from which death liberates us, the moderates might just as well help them into their suicide vests, arm them with machetes, and send them out to do what God wants! And they 'know' this ONLY by 'faith'.
The problem is faith in the hands of the simple-minded faithful, empowered and encouraged by those who sell them faith as a virtue because they don't have anything else. The truth is, faith is the triumph of ignorance over knowledge; the triumph of certainty over truth and an abdication of personal responsibility.
The murdering fanatics who carried out these atrocities were just as much victims of faith, and those who sell faith a virtue, as were their innocent victims.
I agree, but the sentences in the holy scriptures are also to blame for religious misdeeds.
ReplyDeleteWords prime people to think in one way or another. To better understand what I mean, have a look at this blog post, Rosa: http://crispysea.blogspot.se/2010/10/intolerant-islam-religion-of-bigotry.html
Especially the Surah 1:7 The Way of those on whom You have bestowed Your Grace, not (the way) of those who earned Your Anger (such as the Jews), nor of those who went astray (such as the Christians).
If those words are repeated 17 times a day in one's prayers, it's quite understandable and obvious that Jews and Christians have less value than a true Muslim has. I'd say that this Surah dehumanizes Jews and Christians.