The title of your question indicates that you’ve decided that certain claims are false based primarily on the fact that they’re part of religious traditions, and are now looking for ways to legitimize your foregone conclusion. Prejudice has it’s uses, but this isn’t a smart approach.

I suggest that you approach this in a different way.

1. Listen to the claim.
2. Evaluate the arguments for and against it.
3. Make a determination about the validity of the claim.
4. Be prepared that your conclusion may not be one that you can create a bullet-proof argument in support of.

Posted: July 26th 2010

See all questions answered by bitbutter

Bravo for your focusing on dismantling the bogus claims of Islam. You for one may be able to elude the fatwa envy of Christians who always complain how Christianity is criticized and not Islam or even Judaism (the three big global religious brands). Paraphrasing the above link, it is because Christianity is the dominate religion in our cultures and therefore, it just happens to be the one with which we are most familiar and whose dangers impact on us directly such as the Christian theocratic movement in America which has been able to weaken the wall of separation between church and state.

However, there are large pockets of Islamic followers in our cultures (not to mention large numbers globally), and we may find ourselves inadequately prepared to respond critically to Islamic beliefs. You can of course until you get up to speed with arguments against Islamic beliefs, just focus that there is no evidence for the supernatural plane and any of its inhabitants, that is, for demons, for gods, for fairies, etc. You can state the Islamic believer is atheistic regarding all other gods, and that you just go one god further. You can say that the Koran is not evidence, just like the Christian Bible is not, because holy books are not evidential, they are revelatory. Extraordinary evidence for extraordinary claims, please. You can introduce them to Sagan’s baloney detection kit. Keep your responses simple and trot out catchy phrases, like my mind is not so open so my brains will fall out. Keep it generic and your replies short.

Ayaan Hirsi Ali’s Infidel will give you a general background of the mind set of Islamic believers. Be warned that she is hated by Islamic believers, especially the women as she really rocks their boat, and also by the multi-cultural apologists/accommodationists for Islam. Ibn Warraq’s Why I Am Not a Muslim is also worth a read.

Here are three links with which you may not be familiar: The UK leading atheist page-Islam, this next link will give you a head start in identifying the arguments which this Muslim believes has already been handled, while giving you lots of specific information about Islamic beliefs, and here you find lots of information/links on Islamic beliefs and dismantling of said beliefs, including reviews of the 1996 book, Why I Am Not a Muslim.

Atheists combating the dangers of religious beliefs are just in the first inning, and because of Islamic fearful intolerance to criticism of their beliefs and the knowledge vacuum resulting from the unfamiliarity with Islam, we got lots of work to do in this respect. If and when you become knowledgeable regarding how to dismantle Islamic arguments, you can write and maintain a blog helping others learn the arguments that you have as generic arguments just don’t pack the same punch as do arguments geared to the particular beliefs of religious followers as they can cling to the delusion that your ignorance of their beliefs means that you are wrong even in your generic arguments. That is, their religion is the one true one, and the generic arguments only pertain to the false competitors.

If you do not want to exert this much effort, you still can do good work combating religious beliefs regardless of brand by being steadfastly focused on that all religions have the same bogus basis. If they did not, they why do they all require non-evidential faith?

Posted: July 24th 2010

See all questions answered by logicel

You don’t need to know the specifics of each individual religion to be able to assess the validity of its claims, because the type of claims made by all theistic religions is the same, and it is the type of 'reasoning’ used that we know to be flawed.

So, for instance, religions will claim the 'evidence’ of miracles performed, or of prophecies apparently come true, or of personal encounters with God.

So the question becomes, not 'Why is Islam [or any other religion] wrong?’, but 'Why shouldn’t we take seriously claims about miracles, prophecies or personal spiritual encounters, etc?’

I suspect each of these questions has been answered here individually before now – might be worth taking a look in the archive. But, in a nutshell, reports of miracles are to be taken with a huge pinch of salt because all sorts of factors can creep in to them: how do you know the events took place at all, and aren’t just a story that has become cemented through constant retelling? How do you know that the person who claims to have witnessed the 'miracle’ wasn’t hallucinating, or dreaming, or exaggerating, or embellishing, or downright lying? (And isn’t any of those explanations more probable than that the laws of physics really were suspended at a given moment in time?)

Prophecies coming true are all very well but whenever you look into them, you find either that the original prophecy was so vague and/or so general that it was bound to 'come true’ eventually, or that the alleged prophecy was actually written after the events it claimed to foresee, or that the alleged events were themselves made up (or, at least, manipulated) in the light of the 'prophecy’ they are supposed to fulfill. A prophecy definitively dated to 640 CE and predicting an enormous tsunami that would kill hundred of thousands of people on 31 December 2004 would be extremely impressive. But the prophecies claimed by the religious as evidence are never remotely that specific – or testable.

As for personal spiritual experience, our knowledge of psychology and neuroscience has taught us to view it as highly suspect. Our brains are extremely suggestible, and intense 'spiritual’ experiences can be triggered by a number of mental states: extreme emotion, extreme tiredness, illness, etc. Furthermore, one person’s spiritual experience of 'God’ is contradicted by another’s: why, since followers of all theistic religions claim that their god reveals himself through such experiences, don’t all such experiences reveal the same god?

And so it goes on. I do recommend a look though the archive on this site: I think you’ll find a lot more information that is relevant to the question of good and bad reasons to believe things. Once you know why claims about invisible pink unicorns are unreliable, you will find yourself able to argue against the existence of leprechauns too!

EDIT – ADDED A DAY LATER
Can I just add that this question has been niggling at me a bit since I first saw it 2 days ago. There are two ways of legitimately arriving at the conclusion that the claims of a religion should be 'put down’, as you put it. The first is that you have engaged properly with those claims, truly understand them, and have good reasons for rejecting them. The second is that you are clear in your mind about good and bad reasons for believing anything, and why the sorts of things that religious claims are based on simply don’t suffice as 'evidence’.

The problem is, you seem to be saying that neither of these applies to you, and you are asking for reasons to 'put down’ religious claims anyway. So how can you know that those claims should be 'put down’? It seems to me as if you are perhaps in danger of putting the cart before the horse: of rejecting religious claims and then looking for reasons to justify the stance you have already taken, rather than taking your stance on the basis of a reasoned and rational thought process.

In the same way that there are both good and bad reasons for believing something, there can be good and bad reasons for not believing it too! I would argue that there are excellent reasons for not believing religious claims, but we should always decide what we believe after a balanced assessment of the question, not before. If you do it the other way round – if you arrive at your conclusion and then look for arguments to back it up – you risk being driven by emotion and wishful thinking, rather than reason. And I prefer to leave that sort of thing to the religious!

Might I recommend a good introduction to critical thinking? It’s called How Do You Know It’s True?, by David Klein and Marymae Klein. It’s not about religion, it’s about how to assess all sorts of claims – newspaper reports, statistics, etc. But the skills learned in those contexts are very useful in assessing religious claims too.

Posted: July 24th 2010

See all questions answered by Paula Kirby