Introduction

This book is not about clerics being bad people. It is about human beings.

We all have beliefs that we care about. Some are beliefs we grew up with. Some have become part of our identity. Some give meaning to our lives or make us feel safe. When such a belief faces a serious question, our minds do not always act like impartial judges. Sometimes, before asking, “What is the truth?” we begin looking for an answer to a different question: “How can I defend what I already believe?”

Clerics are human beings too.

The difference is that, for a cleric, religious belief is usually more than a personal belief. Years of education, social respect, status, relationships, and sometimes profession and income are connected to it. In addition, a cleric is expected to have answers to other people’s questions and to defend the religion he represents. Therefore, the same mental processes that may lead any of us to defend a cherished belief may have stronger reasons and greater opportunities to appear in a cleric.

These processes are the subject of this book.

In the pages that follow, we will see how we may accept a standard when it supports our belief and abandon the same standard when it works against it; how we may respond to the absence of an answer by claiming that an answer exists but has not yet been found; how we may shift the burden of proof from the person making a claim to the person questioning it; and how emotions, fear, hope, sacredness, philosophical complexity, miracles, morality, and even science may be used to strengthen a belief without actually proving that belief to be true.

Many of these methods are not necessarily used consciously. A person who commits a fallacy does not necessarily know that he is doing so. He may believe his own argument even more strongly than his audience does. For this reason, the purpose of this book is not to uncover deliberate deception by a particular group of people. The more important issue is to recognize the mistakes that human beings can make while being completely sincere.

I am no exception.

When I speak in this book about the fallacies of clerics, I do not mean that the author himself is immune to fallacies. Every argument in these pages should be examined with the same care that I ask the reader to use when examining religious arguments. If an argument is wrong, the name of its author, the subject of the book, or our agreement with its conclusion should not save it.

This point is important to the main purpose of the book.

I am not asking the reader to disbelieve what clerics say. I am asking the reader to pay attention to the reason why he believes what a cleric says. If an argument is sound, it should be able to stand on its own, regardless of the clothing, title, sacred status, fame, or religion of the person presenting it. In the same way, if a critic makes a bad argument, the fact that he is criticizing religion adds nothing to the value of his argument.

The same standard should be applied to religion itself.

A person born into a Muslim, Christian, Jewish, Hindu, Buddhist, or any other religious family is usually introduced to answers to some of life’s greatest questions long before becoming capable of examining complex arguments: Who is God? How did the world come into existence? What is right and what is wrong? What happens after death? And what is the path to salvation?

The problem begins when the answer enters our mind before the question does.

When that happens, we may use all our intellectual abilities not to find an answer, but to defend the answer we already have. The more intelligent and educated we are, the more capable we may even become at constructing complicated arguments to defend it.

For this reason, this book is less a book about religion than a book about how we think about religion.

Its central question is also simple:

If a religion is true, should we not be able to examine its truth with the same fairness and freedom of thought that we use to examine any other important claim?

And if an all-knowing and wise God exists, why should we be afraid of such an examination?

The reader does not have to agree with my conclusions. In fact, I hope that no conclusion will be accepted simply because it is written in this book. The purpose of this book will be better served if, after closing it, the reader asks one simple question more often than before—not only when listening to clerics, but also when listening to critics of religion, writers, philosophers, scientists, and even when examining his own beliefs:

“How do I know this is true?”