Deeds Versus Belief

Indeed, those who have believed then disbelieved, then believed, then disbelieved, and then increased in disbelief–never will Allah forgive them, nor will He guide them. – Qur’an 4:137

Can doubt be a sin? Can a sincerely held opinion be evil? One of the problems I perceived while reading the Qur’an is that, if people seriously believe in it, and later on experience a crisis of faith and of sincerity, it has the potential to make a person’s existential crisis far more difficult, potentially causing greater depression and anxiety, and unnecessarily adding fuel to human angst.

As we saw in our essay on how Muhammad treated proof, it’s clear that he treated belief as a mere option and exhibited little intellectual rigor with regards to the factual value of claims. Furthermore, he adopted a punitive, fear-base conception of morality as based on punishment in the afterlife–which appears to have fed his bias against unbelievers, and cemented his equating belief with righteousness.

Indeed, the worst of living creatures in the sight of Allah are those who have disbelieved, and they will not [ever] believe. The ones with whom you made a treaty but then they break their pledge every time, and they do not fear Allah. – Quran 8:55-56

While reading the Qur’an, I made a very sincere effort to see Muhammad’s point. Based on the above passage on the violation of treaties, it seems like he attributes to infidels the inability to be true to their oaths. To be fair, the matter or oath-breaking as tied to faith (because oaths were pronounced by the Gods in antiquity) is also mentioned by Philodemus of Gadara in his scroll on piety. Also, the evils of oath-breaking are exemplified in the Norse myth of Ragnarok, the Doom of the Gods which was initiated when Loki broke his oath by killing the son of his blood-brother Odin. However, we in the West have for centuries lived under secular laws, and we do not treat atheists as any less capable of abiding by their contracts. Is it really fair to say this?:

To those who disbelieve in the hereafter belong all evil qualities. – Qur’an 16:60

… particularly in light of the unimaginable evil that has been carried out throughout history by men of God? Should men of God not be at least humble concerning these kinds of claims, and give non-believers the benefit of the doubt when it comes to contracts and treaties? And what about Nobel prize winners, and members of the academy of the sciences–most of whom have historically been atheists? Can these men and women–who have made very valuable contributions to society–really be said to be evil, or to have “all the evil qualities”? By contrast, only one Muslim has ever been won the Nobel Price for his work in the sciences, and he’s often vilified by the majority of the Muslim community for being an Ahmadiyya–this is a small, missionary sect of Islam that preaches non-violence and accepts Buddha and Krishna as prophets.

One of the contradictions in the Qur’an can be found in 6:160 and 21:47, where rewards and punishments are stipulated for deeds, but then elsewhere (5:5, 14:18 and 24:39) it says that being a non believer makes your good deeds void.

Like with the Pauline epistles, in the Qur’an we find the doctrine that belief in the supernatural, not deeds, determine one’s fate in the hereafter (39:56). In 2:217 and 2:161, in verses that were revealed in the latter part of Muhammad’s mission–when he had amassed political power and was engaged in warfare and recruitment of soldiers–he told his followers that if they died as non-believers, their deeds would become void, and that dying as disbelievers would send them to hell forever.

All of this begs a question on the logic of submission proposed by the Qur’an: is there ever a case when submission (sometimes sublimated as “surrender” by the mystically inclined) to a god or to another person (a prophet, in this case) can make a person good, moral or happy–other than for the avoidance of threats and violence coming from that powerful person or from his followers? This is the other side of the coin: refusing to submit will not necessarily make us unhappy, evil or immoral, but also submitting does not necessarily make us moral or happy. I sense great moral confusion among the religious in this.

There are many problems with both the Pauline and the Islamic versions of the replacement of justice with credulity–a matter that was also addressed by Diogenes. Let’s therefore always keep in mind the wise conclusion of chapter 14 of A Few Days in Athens:

We shall both be amply repaid … if this truth remain with you — that an opinion, right or wrong, can never constitute a moral offense, nor be in itself a moral obligation. It may be mistaken; it may involve an absurdity, or a contradiction. It is a truth; or it is an error: it can never be a crime or a virtue.

Further Reading:

Diogenes on Righteousness Versus Credulity