Blind faith among Muslims and Christians

I once taught a Muslim high school student who was one of the brightest in the class. But the subject of the dinosaurs came up one day, and he flat out told me he didn't believe in them. Upon further questioning he said that he did, however, believe that giant humans roamed the earth several thousand years ago because the Koran says so. (Some Christians believe the Bible also has such references, as in Genesis 6:4).

When I pointed out that there's no evidence for the belief that giants roamed the earth, but there's a ton of evidence for the dinosaurs, he replied that it doesn't matter - the Koran cannot be wrong.

This was certainly not the first time I'd been exposed to this kind of mindless blind faith in a supposedly holy book. It reminded me very much of a lot of Christians in my home country, the United States.



And so I pointed that out to him, that there are many Christians who would say the same thing about their Bible. How do you know your book is the right one, and theirs is not? And don't you realize that if you'd been raised in a Christian family and culture you'd be believing the same thing about the Bible that you now believe about the Koran? But this line of reasoning had no more effect on him than it would on a fundamentalist Christian.

This should not be surprising because Christianity and Islam are sister religions, both being rooted in Judaism. If you look at all the major religions of the world, these three (Judaism, Christianity and Islam) are far more alike, and have more in common with each other, than they do with any other religion.

Traditionally, the focus of all three is outward, toward a god who is imagined to be "out there", a separate being from you. This is very different from many Eastern religions where the focus is inward - toward a deeper, more essential part of you that the religious stories and gods are metaphorically referring to. This is why in many Eastern traditions the search is inner, with practices such as meditation, whereas in the Western religions the search for god is outward, with practices like prayer.

Believing in a god that is a separate being from you easily leads to the idea of divine judgement and punishment. But this belief is exposed as absurd once you realize the whole thing is referring to an inner reality.

Not realizing that all gods are just labels/metaphors for the same inner reality, it's a short step to believing that your particular religion's god is the only true one, and that all others are false. Once you get this idea that your religion is true and all others are false it easily leads to an "us versus them" mentality which results in dogmatic and closed-minded thinking, conflicts with others, and even religious wars.

Needless to say, this has been the sad history of both Christianity and Islam. It comes as no surprise that they are the two bloodiest religions in human history. Just think of the violent suppression of the pagan religions, the Crusades, the Inquisition, the religious wars between Catholics and Protestants, the witch hunts, and the forced conversions of others during the colonization of the rest of the world.

And the same narrow-minded thinking and intolerance that produced all of these things is still widespread among both Christians and Muslims today. Is it any wonder that we're still seeing a lot of foolishness going on in the name of these two religions?