The Fallacies of Religious Clerics by N. Fakhr - HTML preview

Treating Converts as Evidence That Their Religion Is True

Religious clerics and believers sometimes regard the existence of people who convert to their religion as evidence that their religion is in harmony with human nature. They may argue that people only need to become familiar with the religion to recognize its truth, and that those who do not accept it simply have not understood it properly.

But this raises a question:

Who is likely to know a religion better—someone who has only recently become familiar with it, or someone who lived within that religion for many years and then left it?

At this point, I, as a religious cleric, am not willing to apply the same standard in both directions.

I was ready to regard someone's conversion to my religion as evidence that my religion was true. But I am not equally willing to regard someone's departure from my religion as evidence that it is false.

So I abandon my original standard and may say instead:

“Those who left the religion had become separated from their true human nature.”

But this creates several new questions.

First, how do we know that the person who converted to the religion had not become separated from human nature?

Second, if someone once had faith but later lost his proper human nature, was that loss somehow the result of all those years of faith? If so, what did the religion do for him during those years?

And third, what exactly do we mean by human nature in the first place?

If by human nature we mean pure reason, then pure reason uses the principles of logic when making judgments. Calling such reason specifically “human” does not add much to its logical value.

If, on the other hand, by human nature we mean human feelings and emotions, then those feelings are certainly human—but until they are examined by reason, we cannot know whether the direction in which they lead us is right or wrong.

So simply claiming that someone's “human nature has been corrupted” does not establish anything.

We would still need other standards by which to determine whether a particular religion is true or false.

Claims of this kind have no independent logical value.

Even if every person in the world converted to a single religion, that would not prove that the religion was true.

For thousands of years, people believed that the Sun moved around the Earth, or that the heart was the center of human emotions. In these cases, as in many others, widely accepted beliefs turned out to be mistaken.

People were not acting against human nature when they held those beliefs, nor did they begin acting according to human nature only when they discovered that they had been wrong.

Our beliefs are shaped by the way we live, what we learn, and our psychological characteristics. Changes in our beliefs are influenced by these things as well.

The idea of “human nature” and its supposed corruption, in the sense in which some religious clerics use these terms, therefore has no clear meaning.

Moreover, even if we decided to treat conversion to or departure from a religion as evidence that the religion is or is not compatible with human nature, we could make such a judgment only if we had reliable statistics about both.

But accurate statistics are difficult to obtain for religions in which apostates—people who leave the religion—may face the death penalty.

For this reason, few religions can reasonably boast merely about the number of people who convert to them.

If people were completely free to leave such religions, we do not know whether the number leaving might be greater than the number joining.

If conversion counts as evidence for my religion, I cannot simply refuse to count leaving it as evidence against it.