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It seems to me that it makes little difference whether the person who believes they have a monopoly on the truth is religious or atheist. Perhaps the assumption that religious people are somehow more prone to this tendency tells us more about the modern (Western) discourse ON religion than it tells us about religion itself.
Looking at the history of Islam, I have always been impressed by its power of conversion, not of peoples -- contrary to popular stereotype -- but of ideas, institutions and cultural artifacts.
Frankly, I thought the Pope's remarks at Regensburg were gratuitously snide and misguided. But I was more saddened than I was offended.
It would seem that neither numbers nor majority status alone are enough to define a nation's religious identity. According to common statistics, there are more Muslims in America than there are in Bahrain, Kuwait and other countries commonly considered Muslim.
As I read it, this question seems to imply that to the extent that religion is "man-made" it is false and has no rightful claim on intelligent people. If I am correct, this would seem to put religion in a pretty unenviable position: If humans have no role in determining its substance, it is oppressive and alienating; to the extent that humans have any role in determining its substance, religion must be false.
It would be easy to turn this question into a straw-man and read into it a presumed contradiction between doing good and being saved. On such a construction, the answer would be that there simply is no such conflict: Doing good deeds IS the way to salvation.
As the Qur’an says: “Do you not see the one who rejects religion? S/he is the one who rebuffs the orphan and does not encourage feeding the poor. Woe unto those who busy themselves in prayer but who are heedless of its meaning. Those who feign religion in order to be seen amongst men, but who will not share so much as a kitchen utensil.”
Perhaps a deeper reading of this question would ask about the actual value or utility of good deeds.
My understanding of Thomas Kuhn’s The Structure of Scientific Revolutions has always been that “knowledge” -- in his case scientific knowledge – constitutes more of a horseshoe that we tend to treat as a fully closed circle.
In the space between the two extremes of the horseshoe, there are always “counterfactuals” that our theory can’t quite explain. Ultimately, when the number of counterfactuals grows to the point that the theory’s explanatory power falls below the level of effort it takes to sustain the theory itself, it is exchanged for another theory, and thus we get a scientific revolution. Ultimately, however, this too will be a horseshoe that we treat as a circle. And thus the cycle continues.
What Islam Really Says About Violence, Rights and Other Religions
Gomaa, Fadlallah, Mubarak, Khan, Siddiqi, Ellison, others | On Faith
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