Question Religions are frequently criticised for the bad conduct of their members or office bearers. And some go so far as to say that this behaviour renders religious belief untenable. I have always believed that since their tenets do not support or encourage this bad conduct such bad behaviour is not a valid criticism of religion. That it is simply the normal outcome of behavioural variation in the human population which says nothing about the validity of religious beliefs. Is this a valid line of reasoning? Peter S.

Accepted:
May 26, 2010

Comments

What a deep and important question! Obviously a detailed answer might look at the detailed tenets of various religions and evaluate them individually ... But a briefer reply would offer both something in support of, and something at odds with, your own way of thinking.

First, in support: there's no question (it seems to me) that human beings vary along every possible dimension, and that there are both 'good' and 'bad' (and 'great' and 'horrible') people to be found both within any major religion and outside them. For many individuals, their goodness/badness may well be prior to, independent of, their religions -- and in no way dependent on the religious belief. (They may even choose their religion because it best expresses their pre-existing goodness.) Moreover, in further support, it's not very clear just what ARE the specific official tenets of any particular religion -- each individual believes some particular set of beliefs which may overlap little, much, or almost not at all with other proponents of that 'same' religion. If so, then we can't be quick to say that the 'religion' causes their behavior, since there isn't any such thing as THE religion -- there are just the individual religious believers.

Second, at odds with your position: fundamentally you're asking an empirical question, i.e. not the kind of thing we can just answer from the armchair. To answer it, like any other similar sociological sort of question, we'd need to devise some sort of survey: perhaps it's the case (say) that proponents of religion X are more likely than proponents of religion Y (or than non-religious believers) to perpetrate bad things ... If any plausible such survey could be devised (and that itself is a good question!), we might well have reason to think that 'the' religion in question is conducive to the behaviors in question ... (Though we'd still have to distinguish cause/effect: does 'the' religion cause the behavior, or does the religion attract those who idnependently are inclined towards such behaviors?)

We surely need to distinguish between (a) bad conduct that happens despite the professed beliefs of the sinner (well, we are all human and our actions too often fall short of our own ideals, whether religiously framed or more secular), and (b) bad deeds that result from someone following through the prescriptions of a loathsome form of religion.

So when people behave vilely to homosexuals precisely because of some crabbed fundamentalist Christian beliefs, or think it is acceptable to kill apostates because caught up in some fundamentalist Islamic cult, then indeed we can rightly find the particular beliefs that lead them to appalling behaviour to be intolerable. By their fruits you shall know them.