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

Expressing Contempt for Opposing Views

When religious clerics find an idea beautiful or appealing, especially when it also supports their religious beliefs, they may treat someone’s rejection of that idea as a sign of foolishness or lack of understanding.

By ridiculing the opposing view, they lower the critic in the eyes of their audience while making their own view appear deeper and more elevated.

For example, someone might argue that when God created human beings, He kindly gave them a liver to remove harmful substances from their blood. A religious cleric may find this explanation beautiful and convincing, especially if it agrees with the creation story he has learned from his religion.

Another person, however, may offer a different explanation. He may say that the organs of living beings, including human beings, developed through millions of years of evolution within the laws of physics, rather than being individually created as acts of divine kindness.

Since this explanation may not fully agree with the creation story told by the religion, the cleric may respond to it with the kind of contempt described above.

For many years, religious clerics from different religions responded to theories of evolution in this way. Even in recent decades, we can still occasionally hear comments of this kind, describing those who accept evolution as ignorant, foolish, or narrow-minded.

Calling an opposing idea foolish is not an argument against it.