Believers treat edifying falsehoods as true when they serve a sacred end

Evidence

A thing becomes true because it serves a higher end; men who would be horrified to assert that the end justifies the means, readily come to believe a means to be just in itself, if it leads to an end of sufficient moment, as they suppose, to the world. In this case, every demonstration of the villainous character of Muhammad and the pernicious nature of Islamic religion seemed to be of the highest value to the faith of Christ - and therefore seemed to be true. — Norman Daniel, Islam and the West, 1391

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the vault cluster’s claims that Islam gets epistemically constructed as the West’s constitutive outside — here the mechanism is theological utility overriding epistemic standards, echoing Aziz’s Racial Muslim construction.
• DEFINE: The passage delineates the mechanism by which motivated reasoning about an enemy religion works: end-driven truth.
• DEEPTHINKING: The identification of a specific epistemic pathology — believing facts because they serve an exalted end while sincerely denying one believes the end justifies the means — is a genuinely subtle mechanism description applicable far beyond this historical case.