Belief and action

In my most recent post about Islam, I mentioned that there is often a tremendous gap between our professed beliefs and how we actually live.  The best treatment of this I’ve ever seen comes from the pen of John Stuart Mill, in his masterpiece On Liberty.  Sometimes, this dissonance is a good thing; it tempers the worst excesses of fanaticism.  Other times it is a tragedy, when we fail to live by our most noble and cherished principles.

As I write this series of posts, it’s healthy for non-Muslims to reflect on their own belief systems as well.  That is the other side of this enormous equation, which I hope to treat eventually.   In the meantime, I’ll let Mill take it away.  If you’re not a Christian, the passage works just as well if you substitute your own most sacred moral principles.

These [Christian precepts] are considered sacred, and accepted as laws, by all professing Christians. Yet it is scarcely too much to say that not one Christian in a thousand guides or tests his individual conduct by reference to those laws. The standard to which he does refer it, is the custom of his nation, his class, or his religious profession. He has thus, on the one hand, a collection of ethical maxims, which he believes to have been vouchsafed to him by infallible wisdom as rules for his government; and on the other, a set of every-day judgments and practices, which go a certain length with some of those maxims, not so great a length with others, stand in direct opposition to some, and are, on the whole, a compromise between the Christian creed and the interests and suggestions of worldly life. To the first of these standards he gives his homage; to the other his real allegiance. All Christians believe that the blessed are the poor and humble, and those who are ill-used by the world; that it is easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the kingdom of heaven; that they should judge not, lest they be judged; that they should swear not at all; that they should love their neighbor as themselves; that if one take their cloak, they should give him their coat also; that they should take no thought for the morrow; that if they would be perfect, they should sell all that they have and give it to the poor. They are not insincere when they say that they believe these things. They do believe them, as people believe what they have always heard lauded and never discussed. But in the sense of that living belief which regulates conduct, they believe these doctrines just up to the point to which it is usual to act upon them.