A generalization about religious belief to which there are, I believe, few exceptions is this: The more confident one is in one's religious beliefs, the more willing one is to subject those beliefs to careful scrutiny; the less confident one is in them--the more one unconsciously fears that they cannot withstand such scrutiny--the more eager one is to find a device that would appear to protect them from careful scrutiny. And, more often than not, such a protective device will include an assault upon human reason.
Now I have no desire to glorify human reason. Some of the most careless thinkers I have known, and even some of the most irrational, have worshiped at the shrine of human reason. We have no choice, however, but to employ the faculties we have when we "test the spirits to see whether they are of God"; indeed, only by reasoning carefully can we exhibit the limits of reason itself. That is also why an all-out assault upon human reason inevitably undermines and defeats itself: If we cannot trust our reasoning powers at all, then neither can we trust that reasoning which supposedly exhibits the limits of reason itself.
When religious people emphasize the limits of human reason, moreover, they sometimes draw the wrong moral. They may begin with some true observations about the finite character of our human minds, the historically conditioned character of much of our reasoning, the lofty and mysterious character of God, or perhaps even the corrupting power of moral evil or sin. But instead of concluding, as they should, that a loving God, who understands our limitations better than we do, would never require more of human reason than it can deliver, they draw a very different moral: namely, that we must set aside our critical faculties altogether and blindly accept some proposition which, according to the best judgment we can muster at the time, seems unworthy of human belief or perhaps even morally repugnant. In an effort to get us to accept such a proposition, they may also identify a humble submission to God with an uncritical submission to some tradition or some sacred text that either endorses, or appears to endorse, the proposition in question. But only a false prophet, I want to suggest, would ask us to accept some proposition, however true, despite the fact that it seems to us, for whatever reason, to be unworthy of human belief.
A false prophet is someone who speaks falsely in the name of God, and here I shall be concerned with a particular kind of false prophet: one who, more often than not, comes in the name of orthodoxy. The false prophets I have in mind are those who use the Bible (or some other sacred text) as a weapon of fear, or as part of an assault upon reason and good sense. At one time or another, they have appealed to the Bible in defense of slavery, racism, the exploitation of women, the burning at the stake of young women (charged with witchcraft), the murder of heretics, and even protracted torture. We find it easy today, perhaps, to appreciate the specious character of at least some of these appeals. But we can also imagine how easily such appeals might confuse a simple peasant farmer who believes fervently that he must bow before the Scriptures. There is perhaps no better way to confuse him and to persuade him to ignore his own conscience than to spout Scripture at him. For if God says something, he will reason, then it must be true, however morally repugnant or logically absurd it may appear to us as fallible human beings. Or, as a bumper sticker I once saw put it: "God said it. I believe it. That settles it." If you can get someone to accept the first statement, the rest is inevitable.