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

Diverting the Questioner’s Attention from a Weak Point of the Religion to Its Strong Points

Sometimes, when clerics have no answer to an objection against a religious command, they try to divert the audience’s attention from the original question and direct it toward what they consider the strong points of their religion.

For example, verse 34 of Surah An-Nisa in the Quran says:

“Men are in charge of women because God has given some more than others and because men spend from their wealth. So righteous women are obedient and guard, in their husbands’ absence, what God has ordered them to guard. As for those women whose disobedience you fear, first advise them, then leave them alone in their beds, and then strike them. If they obey you, do not seek a way against them.”

Today, many people find this verse troubling. According to the understanding of human rights accepted by many people today, men do not have an inherent, God-given superiority over women. Moreover, the verse says that if men fear disobedience from their wives, they may ultimately strike them in order to make them obey. In this conflict between husband and wife, the woman is the accused, the man is the complainant, and the man is also the judge who decides when the time has come to strike her.

The verse itself does not specify how severe the striking may be, although conditions and limitations may have been stated elsewhere. But critics can argue that however mild those conditions may be, it is still the woman who suffers the humiliation of being struck after her husband has decided that she deserves it. The same right does not appear to be given to a woman if, for example, she financially supports her husband. She cannot decide that his behavior is unacceptable and then strike him to make him obey. In the verse, the man’s position over the woman is presented as something God has granted him.

In earlier times, clerics generally accepted this superiority as a right, and most people did not find it particularly troubling. Today, however, many people object to it and consider it contrary to human rights and ethics. Some clerics, especially when responding to women who object to the verse, therefore shift the discussion toward women’s rights in Islam.

They may compare the position of women in Islam with the position of women before Islam and say, for example, that girls were buried alive before Islam and that Islam gave women dignity and rights. They may emphasize traditions and hadiths1 in which the Prophet and the Imams praise women. They may also point to religious duties from which women are exempt, such as participation in certain forms of jihad. In this way, they try to direct the audience’s attention toward teachings that present women positively and away from the original question.

Some critics, however, do not accept this as an answer. They say that the original objection remains: the man is still given a superior position over the woman, rather than merely different rights under particular circumstances. In a marital conflict, he may still make the judgment and, in some circumstances, carry out the punishment himself, while the woman is not given the corresponding right.

For these critics, the ethical problem can be illustrated with a simple test. Suppose women offered men all the praise, dignity, and rights that these clerics say Islam has given women, but in exchange took away this particular authority from men and gave it to women instead. Would men accept such an arrangement?

The critics argue that most men probably would not. From this they conclude that the ethical principle “Do not wish for others what you would not wish for yourself” has not been followed in this command.

More recently, some religious scholars who have recognized that the previous responses do not answer the central objection have offered a different interpretation of the verse. They argue that the Arabic word wa-dribuhunna (وَاضْرِبُوهُنَّ), which for centuries was commonly understood here to mean “strike them,” can instead be understood in another sense, such as “leave them” or “go away from them.”

This method—reinterpreting a sentence that for many centuries was understood in one relatively direct way, and whose traditional interpretation was also supported by religious commentaries and traditions, by giving one of its words a less obvious meaning—has become more common in modern times. Similar methods can be found among interpreters of different religions.

But when the text in question claims to be divine guidance for humanity, this creates another problem.

In the case of this verse, such a reinterpretation would mean that the all-knowing God intended something different from what generations of believers and scholars understood. God wanted to guide human beings and tell them what they should and should not do, yet apparently did not foresee that the sentence He used would be understood as granting husbands the right to strike their wives.

For fourteen centuries, according to this interpretation, believers misunderstood the verse. Some men, particularly those with more violent tendencies, could therefore use it as religious justification for physically disciplining their wives, even if the blows were supposed to be limited and controlled.

Yet throughout all that time—and even while the Prophet himself was alive—God did not replace the verse or send another verse clearly explaining it and preventing this long-lasting misunderstanding. This is especially significant because clerics elsewhere argue that God took the understanding of the original audience into account and spoke to them in language they could understand.

This raises another question. Is the cleric or religious believer who offers such explanations really defending God?

Is he trying to protect God from the accusation of ignorance, so that no one will imagine that God could make such mistakes?

Surely, anyone who believes that there is an ultimate source or creator of the universe would find it difficult to imagine that being as ignorant.

What the religious scholar or devoted believer is actually trying to defend is the claim that these commands and verses came from God. He wants to prevent himself and others from considering another possibility: that the founder of the religion was not actually sent by God, but was simply a person who claimed to be a prophet.

If this possibility enters a believer’s mind, even briefly, the believer may eventually abandon the religion and then live without it, as millions of other people do.

At first, this may be psychologically painful. The person may feel upset about having spent years of life holding religious beliefs and many hours following religious commands. He may also be disappointed in himself because he realizes that he was not as rational as he once thought. He may feel that he believed things that he now considers unreasonable.

Indeed, one reason people sometimes become strongly attached to a religion is that they do not want to accept the possibility that they may have been mistaken for many years.

But after accepting that possibility, a person may even become proud of having been able to examine those beliefs critically, despite the psychological difficulty involved, and to reach a conclusion through his own thought and reasoning. It is uncommon to meet someone who has gone through such a process and feels ashamed or regrets having examined his beliefs.

But what about a cleric?

If a cleric begins to suspect that his prophet or religion may not actually be divine, he may have much more to lose than an ordinary believer.

He may have to give up not only his beliefs but also the respect he receives from religious people. For years, he may have made the clergy his profession, or at least one of his professions. He may therefore lose the income that comes with that position.

If he is a high-ranking cleric, he may possess considerable wealth, influence, and power because of his religious position. Giving these up may be far more difficult than abandoning religious faith is for an ordinary believer. In some societies, openly abandoning religion may even place a cleric’s life in danger.

The forces encouraging a cleric to remain religious and to insist that his religion is true may therefore be much stronger than those acting on an ordinary believer. For this reason, expecting a cleric to judge the truth of his own religion with complete impartiality may be unrealistic.

Yet when many believers hear that there are arguments against the divine origin of their religion, they turn to books written by their own clerics and religious scholars. They expect to find an impartial judgment there.

In reality, believers often approach these works hoping to find an “answer” to the critics so that their doubts will disappear. They look to their own clerics for the final judgment rather than carefully analyzing for themselves what they read or hear.

If a cleric uses several fallacies and eventually reaches the conclusion that was predictable from the beginning, the believer may accept those fallacies even when they would be obvious to someone approaching the argument without the same prior commitment.

For many believers, a cleric’s fallacies are difficult to recognize because every response is received with the thought:

“So there is an answer to this criticism. The criticism has not gone unanswered.”

The believer is unlikely to examine the cleric’s answer with the same skepticism used toward the critic and ask:

“But is this answer actually logical?”

Whether we are believers or clerics, we may be highly intelligent and educated. In many areas of our personal and professional lives, we may also be fair-minded, careful, and precise.

But the way we respond to criticism of our religion may have surprisingly little to do with our intelligence, education, fairness, or precision.

Before our minds use their abilities to examine criticism of religion in order to discover whether the religion is true, they may already regard the truth as settled. Their task then changes. Instead of asking whether the criticism is correct, the mind searches for ways to dismiss it.

This tendency can be even stronger among clerics.

Skill in debate and argument is often a source of pride among clerics, and many of them may indeed be highly skilled. But this ability is most effective when the discussion concerns religious questions within the framework of the religion itself—for example, what it means to say that Jesus is the Son of God, what is meant by the Throne of God, or what divine justice means.

They may also be highly skilled in criticizing other religions and sects.

But it is much less common for an experienced cleric to debate someone who rejects the religion itself, especially in front of an audience of believers. In a society where the cleric has influence, he may instead use the methods discussed earlier to keep critics of religion away from himself and his audience. Where he lacks the power to do this, he may avoid the debate altogether or, if he enters it, postpone his answer to some future time.

My purpose is not to say that anyone in this story of religion is the “bad” character while someone else is the “good” character.

What I have described is largely the result of human psychology.

All of us were once children. What we are taught in childhood, and the way in which it is taught, can combine with our psychological characteristics to turn us into strongly committed believers or into clerics with the characteristics described above.

When, during childhood, we are introduced to only one religion and one set of beliefs, and these are presented to us as sacred and unquestionable truth, the resulting way of thinking can increase the distance between us and the truth.

And once that distance becomes great enough, it may become extremely difficult for anyone—even ourselves—to overcome it. We may then build our own lives, and sometimes affect the lives of others, on beliefs that were instilled in us long before we were able to examine them critically.