Amen
A good editorial earlier this week in the Los Angeles Times by Hanif Kureishi, author of My Beatiful Launderette. Entitled "Arguing with the Islamic 'truth'," it encapsulates the problem of trying to reason with true believers. If someone believes he has direct contact with the truth, he can be fairly invulnerable to rational argument (though, perhaps, not to emotion appeals, or threats, for that matter).
If you have faith in a higher power, and believe you must submit to it, it can lead to distrust in reason. Or perhaps I should say that logic is to be chained to the limits of your faith--reason is not to be used to question it.
Kureishi quotes a Muslim scholar who puts the problem quite well (though he doesn't think it's a problem): "Allah is the subject of faith and loving obedience, not of rational inquiry or purely discursive thought. Unaided human reason is inferior in status to the gift of faith."
This kind of belief is fine if you're lucky enough to pick the one faith that gives you the full truth. Otherwise, you're stuck in a hole that's hard to climb out of, since the kind of questioning that can help is what you will fight against. How do you know you've got the truth to begin with? Because your teacher told you? Because it "feels" true? Probably not through reasoning, since faith and obedience are more important.
Update: Salman Rushdie speaks out on this issue. I don't think it'll help much, however, for the reasons listed above. True believers tend to feel their faith comes from revelation that transcends time or place.
posted by LAGuy @ 12:16 AM
3 Comments:
"Kureishi quotes a Muslim scholar who puts the problem quite well (though he doesn't think it's a problem): "Allah is the subject of faith and loving obedience, not of rational inquiry or purely discursive thought. Unaided human reason is inferior in status to the gift of faith.""
Whether LAGuy will agree with me or not, it is NOT the Christian position that God is not a worthy subject of rational inquiry or discursive thought. And there are doctors of theology over hundreds of years to prove it. It has long been (as in long before 9/11) a Christian critique of the Islamic religion that it discourages rational inquiry.
How to address the greater theme?:"A good editorial earlier this week in the Los Angeles Times by Hanif Kureishi, author of My Beatiful Launderette. Entitled "Arguing with the Islamic 'truth'," it encapsulates the problem of trying to reason with true believers. If someone believes he has direct contact with the truth, he can be fairly invulnerable to rational argument (though, perhaps, not to emotion appeals, or threats, for that matter)."
As a true believer, I tend to get emotional when told that I am fairly invulnerable to rational argument. I spend most of my days making rational arguments to people to encourage them to do the best thing for their child's health. I admit that sometimes I allow emotional appeal to work since it can greatly increase compliance. Still the main purpose behind my work could well be described as irrational. Logic does not necessarily lead to a world where people care for each other. Reason alone does not dictate a moral position.
My claim is people who are true believers tend to be immune to reason regarding what they believe in, not everyday parts of life that don't conflict with it. How else could we have countless mutually exclusive faiths, generally based on old stories others have told, that have people believing they've found the ultimate truth? The attraction to their belief is emotional, and not easily defeated by reason. Even a believer in one religion can see this easily in others. (I might add there are also "true believers" who believe in things that aren't officially religion.)
Using logic has nothing to do with living without emotion.
Hey, you are the one that brought emotions in. You said, "If someone believes he has direct contact with the truth, he can be fairly invulnerable to rational argument (though, perhaps, not to emotion appeals, or threats, for that matter)."
But your answer was NON responsive. Why is anyone writing about 'arguing with the Islamic truth?' Because it does affect their/our everyday life. Their vision of the world does conflict with ours. Yet you dismiss them and me in the same breath.
Our culture believes in reason, has done so demonstrably for a long, long time. This is based on a JudeoChristian view of God which allows even encourages reasoned investigation into God and creation. But you blithely dismiss this.
Then (missing my point) you refer to my aside about emotions and fail to answer how pure reason arrives at a moral position. Are there limits to reason?
Now may I address the NEW points you raised in the last post. 1. "Countless mutual exclusively faiths ..." 2. "The attraction to their belief is emotional, and not easily defeated by reason."
1. If there is an answer, a true answer, then it is not defeated by one hundred, one thousand or even one million wrong answers. That is logic for you. Besides these countless faiths are very countable. They are not mutually exclusive. Many share numerous historical as well as moral ideas. Our own faiths claim the same writings and history. Islam claims what we would consider a corrupted form of the Old testament. Now that accounts for a good percentage of the worlds population with just three faiths sharing some of the same material. The fact that the writings are OLD, does that disprove their truthfulness? Does the fact that Christians follow the Ten Commandments make Christianity completely exclusive from Judaism?
2. I think that I have said this before: My attraction to my faith is NOT emotional. What evidence do you have to make this general statement? Would you allow me to say that non believers base their non belief mainly on emotions? As to being not easily defeated by reason, I say you are giving up before you even started. Some pretty big thinkers have given their lives thought to "God" and other unreasonable concepts. You write them off pretty easily.
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