Religious believers who try to put into practice what their religious scriptures tell them often insist that they can't be blamed - after all, this is what their religion teaches and they have an obligation to do it. It's not their fault, right? It may sound 'modest' to them to say that there are merely doing their god's will, but it's really a deliberate abdication of personal responsibility.

Christopher Hitchens writes in the Fall 2000 issue of Free Inquiry:

At least since Einstein, we have lived in a world where the discoveries of physics and genetics are far more awe-inspiring, as well as infinitely more liberating, than the claims of any religion. Yet somehow, our very idioms and vernaculars fail to rise to the moment. Even worse, we preserve the literal-mindedness of the age of ignorance; the epoch when our ancestors were taught to believe that the universe was man-centered and that everything revolved around us.

At the heart of this is the absurd and contradictory notion of “humility,” whereby believers consider it humble and self-effacing to appoint themselves the mere executors of a superior being. (“Don’t mind me — I’m just doing God’s will.”) This false modesty would he no more than irritating if it was not accompanied by insistent demands for real money, and real secular power over other humans, in the here and now.

A common example of this, I think, is when Christians cite the Psalms verse “The fool says in his heart, ‘there is no God’,” and then try to deflect criticism by saying that they are only quoting the Bible — these are the words of God, not their own. They refuse to take personal responsibility not only for saying that nonbelievers are fools, but also for the implicit and unstated following words: “They are corrupt, they do abominable deeds, there is none that does good.”

It isn’t a sign of “humility” when believers insist that they are merely following the lead of their god because everything in their scriptures requires interpretation. No one takes everything in the Bible in the exact same literal manner — they pick and choose, deciding how to best interpret and implement what they read based upon their beliefs, prejudices, and cultural context. This makes them personally responsible for what they do and what they say.

 

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