MISTAKE OF GENERALISATION

A form of faulty thinking is taking one particular example and projecting it as a general phenomenon and, on that basis, presenting a generalised opinion about a subject as a whole.

One form of faulty thinking is what can be called ‘Making a generalisation.’ It is to take one particular example and project it as a general phenomenon and, on that basis, to present a generalised opinion about a subject as a whole. Making generalisations is so common that only a few people can be said to be free from it.

Consider the following case. In the Bible (Mathew 10:34), Jesus is quoted as having said, ‘Do not suppose that I have come to bring peace to the earth. I did not come to bring peace, but a sword.’

Now, this saying attributed to Jesus has the status of an exception in the entire corpus of utterances attributed to him in the Bible. Most of the other utterances attributed to him in the Bible are based on teachings such as love and ethics. This being the case, to take the above words and claim that Jesus’ mission was to pick up the sword, is to project what is an exception as a general rule. This would be a completely wrong generalisation, which would be academically unacceptable.

This same sort of wrong generalisation has been made with regard to the Quran. Taking some verses about war in the Quran, some people claim that the Quran is a book of war and violence. Now, this is actually a very erroneous generalisation. The fact of the matter is that more than 99% of the verses of the Quran are those that are related to such positive themes as peace and humanity. Less than 1% of the verses of the Quran provide instructions for defence in case of open aggression by an opponent. In this context, asserting that a few verses represent the overall teachings of the Quran is entirely inaccurate and lacks scientific validity.

This evil of making generalisations is very widespread in our society. Many people’s mentality is such that if there is someone they adore, they select some of his virtues and project them in a grossly exaggerated manner, using these few virtues to present a supposedly complete picture of the person. On the other hand, they ignore the virtues of someone they dislike, and, instead, search for and extract some of his faults. They express these faults in a very exaggerated fashion in order to create a misleading general impression about the person as a whole.

Both these forms of generalisations are completely wrong. This method of forming an opinion about someone or something is not intellectually sound and is also unethical and unjust. In a society where many people engage in such generalisations, people will have wrong impressions of each other, impressions that have no basis in reality. I have experienced this sort of wrong generalisation in the course of the mission of inviting people to God. Some people, focusing on just one aspect of my writings, sought, on the basis of this, to create a misleading general impression about me and my views. Such a method, while not being academic, is also dishonest.