Essential and Accidental Matters in Religion

One of the fundamental questions regarding religion's teachings is how to classify them. The main topic of this article is the division of religion into essential and accidental issues expressed by some writers. The meaning of the two terms in this view is different from their meaning in other places. The accidental teachings form 99 percent of the commands in this approach. These teachings are not the real Islam thus we are not obliged to obey them. According to the above theory, the two main reasons for considering Islam's commands accidental are: they are either conditional propositions with false antecedents or they are answers to the questions asked from lawgiver. To evaluate these reasons, none of them are completely correct. The conditional propositions with false antecedents have the fallacy of confusing motivation and the motivated. The second reason has some problems as well including the fallacy of generalizing the predicate of an exception to all cases. The method of gathering data in this article is library research and the method of processing them is an analytic-critical method.