Aren’t people likely to lose faith if it was rationalized?

Question:
Isn’t it likely that common people could embrace atheism or other misleading philosophies if the advice of rationalizing religion was followed? And if that was a real possibility then was it not better for, at least, the less-intelligent believer to not rationalize his faith and remain blindly loyal to his religious thought?

Response:
The question assumes two things: that atheism and some other philosophies were faithless ideologies and that it was better to have some faith instead of having none. Both assumptions were incorrect.

Those who believe that there was no God (atheists) are as much believers as any other. Like all other faiths, they too need to come up with some intellectual justification for their stance, which would amount to belief in the unseen. Clearly, no one has gone around the entire space of our universe to be able to declare with authority that there was no God. Even if some one did so, it would still not mean anything significantly disturbing to believers in God because their belief was that God could not be seen. An atheist was thus a believer as well as a disbeliever like any other religious person. For instance, a Muslim was a believer in the faith that Qur’an was the book of God and a disbeliever in the Christian faith that Jesus was the son of God. Conversely, Christians were believers in the faith that Jesus was the son of God and were disbelievers in the Muslim faith that Muhammad was His last messenger. Similar was the case of atheists. They were simultaneously believers in their own faith that there was no God and were disbelievers in the faith that there was a God.

The question therefore was not whether one had a belief or not. No one can live without a belief. The real question was as to which faith was the right one. The course of action of rationalizing I propose to all believers could be followed by believers of all faiths without making anyone appear a criminal in the eyes of others. The only person who could be considered guilty of believing criminally in a wrong faith should be the one who would deliberately stick to his belief despite knowing that it was wrong. The other person who should be considered guilty of not following the correct approach towards faith was the one who never bothered to question his own faith or criminally avoided to know what was on offer from other faiths. It was only God Who could decide whether there were some people who were being criminals.

If what has been mentioned above was correct, then by remaining open to other faiths and religious views, one was not in danger of losing faith; in the process of one’s objective religious quest, one was only likely to embrace a new, hopefully, better faith. The fear of losing faith to atheism would have been worthy of serious consideration had all religious people agreed that while all religious views were good, if not ideal, atheism was the only genuinely bad one. The fact is that most Muslims believe that Christian faith was more or less as misleading as atheism and Christians have similar views about Muslim faith. Likewise was true for believers in all other faiths.

Many Muslims hold the view about their fellow Muslims who have faith-systems and religious approaches different from theirs that they were as unacceptable to God as non-Muslims were. An oft-quoted hadith says that Muslims would get divided into seventy-three sects and only one of them shall enter the paradise. Likewise is the approach of many believers in the non-Muslim faiths as well. If such perceptions are held by many religious Muslims, how could an ordinary Muslim feel confident that he was following the right approach on Islam save through doing his own research?

As for the claim that an intellectually ordinary person was incapable of knowing religious truth through his own efforts, consider the following response: If that claim was true, ordinary individuals should never be credited nor blamed, neither by humans nor by God, for believing in the right or wrong faith. What we find in Qur’an is the mention that all humans were going to be held accountable for their beliefs and actions. However, such accountability would be based on the Almighty’s perfect assessment of the individual’s true capacity to believe and act correctly. Qur’an: “Those who believed and did good deeds – We shall not make a soul accountable for doing anything beyond its potential – such will be the inhabitants of the paradise.” (Qur’an; 7:42)

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