Someone back from Afghanistan has sent a link to this forum discussing, in fascinating detail, what Pope Benedict XVI’s approach toward Islam is. It clarified many of the questions that have been poorly reported in the press, among which are: does Benedict see Islam as a “religion of peace”; is Islam perceived as a strategic enemy or competitor with Christianity; and lastly, does the Pope advocate co-existence with Islam. Unfortunately, the format means the reader will have to put together many of the relevant paragraphs himself. Here are some of the highlights as I see them.
- Benedict doesn’t see much scope for a ‘theological’ debate between Christianity and Islam, which is of interest to only a specialist few. Instead, the Pope sees the real debate taking place at a cultural/civilizational level in which the subject of sharia will be a key item.
- The debate is inevitable, because Islam at its roots is profoundly different from Christianity. Those who wish to bury the differences under relativism and a glib multiculturalism will fail.
- Islam’s desire for supremacy is not directed primarily at Christianity, rather it is directed at any competitor.
- The Pope believes that fighting terrorism means working with Muslims. It can’t be purged from from the outside; it has to be tackled from the inside from the inside. “Terrorism of any kind is a perverse and cruel [a word that he repeats 3 times] choice which shows contempt for the sacred right to life and undermines the very foundations of all civil coexistence. If together we can succeed in eliminating from hearts any trace of rancour, in resisting every form of intolerance and in opposing every manifestation of violence, we will turn back the wave of cruel fanaticism that endangers the lives of so many people and hinders progress towards world peace. The task is difficult but not impossible and the believer can accomplish this.”
- Benedict is also aware of what I would call the third man in the room; both traditional Christianity and Islam are also in competition with secular materialism. The structure of the debate implies that just as secular materialism can make alliances with radical Islam against Christianity, there is scope for alliance with religious Muslims against secular materialism. “It has been said that we must not speak of God in the European constitution, because we must not offend Muslims and the faithful of other religions. The opposite is true: what offends Muslims and the faithful of other religions is not talking about God or our Christian roots, but rather the disdain for God and the sacred, that separates us from other cultures and does not create the opportunity for encounter, but expresses the arrogance of diminished, reduced reason, which provokes fundamentalist reactions.”
There is more, but I leave that to the readers. I may have misunderstood some of Benedict’s points and I hope the readers will correct me if I misapprehended them.
Disclaimer, my religion is not Benedict’s.
If I understand his point it is that the methods of terror are to rejected because they are inherently impious. The one thing that we can, if we are religious, agree on that we know for sure about God is that he created life. Therefore a reverence for life is the basis for all worship. Jews are closest to Benedict’s sense of the religious life and earn his sympathy I’d suspect, because they reflexively toast “L’Chaim” that is “To Life.” If persons act contrary to God’s will then God can and will punish them but the details are beyond our knowledge. For any human to kill in the name of God and take what he knows came from God merely because he thinks he is acting to punish a transgression on God’s behalf is an act of perversity akin to the Greek sin of hubris.
The inner change that Benedict is hoping for in Islam is for this element of modesty to enter their perspective so that God is left to punish offenses against his law and humans only punish violations against human regulations. Artful and sensitive as Benedict’s goal is I would not bet the family farm on Islam undergoing this reform any time soon. The injunctions to punish with blood for any offense against Allah, especially apostasy, is to deeply part of the core of the Islamic message.
“It has been said that we must not speak of God in the European constitution, because we must not offend Muslims and the faithful of other religions.”
But of course the primary reason is to not offend secularists.
Pope Benedict, and all subsequent Popes, are some of the few people who can actively challenge Islam. Not, as you point out, W, at the doctrinal level, but because the popes can be surrounded by a ring of bodyguards to twarth the RoPers when they come a-head-hack’n.
This is a moment of opportunity for Catholicism to regain lost souls. I’m surprised that the Pope is not doing more, but I guess he has to take it very carefully and let time do its magic. At least he hasn’t blown it like the Arch Druid, Rowan Williams.
But your third man in the room will win. He was winning anyway. Resurgent Islam will re-energise Catholicism, and when Catholicism is triumphant, the third man currently slouching towards Bethlehem will be born.
ADE
The site ‘chiesa’ often contains important insights about Pope Benedict’s thinking and other ‘inside’ stuff. The specifically Islam-related topics (translated from chiesa’s original Italian into English) are thoughtfully assembled here.
I meant here.
If the Pope takes Catholicism seriously, then he cannot rest until the entire world is Catholic. That is the whole point and goal of the Gospel. Any other goal is heresy. Coexistence with cults (the Church’s viewpoint, not necessarily mine) like Islam, Protestantism and secular humanism, all of which deny many fundamental Catholic doctrines, is not possible.
As a practical matter co-existence with either secular socialist societies or Islam are incompatible.
Islam wants to rule, everything, and must to deal with it’s young men who are in excess supply due to polygamy. Pity them when they can’t expand I suppose, they inevitably war on each other without mercy.
This struggle at it’s bottom is a fight over women. It has always been a fight over women, and will always be a fight over women.
Ultimately, some sort of Christian society is likely to win, in combination with the Chinese, because that is the society that produces the most useful mix of weaponry and will, and most important ever newer and deadlier weapons.
Secular socialist societies are good at producing some very interesting technology and science that never goes anywhere, like how the Byzantines used Greek Fire and then just … stopped. Islam is good at producing lots of young men with fervor and little else. Christian societies in one form or another generally balance out between technology advances and will, with “enough” manpower coupled with superior technology to mostly prevail.
Anyone who thinks this conflict can be “managed” or terrorism controlled is living a fantasy, including the Pope. I’d tell this to his face: Islam’s polygamy DRIVES terrorism, obviously, and Muslims will not be Muslims without polygamy. So expect more and more of it, faster and faster, and bigger and bigger death tolls. Until one society gets tired and wipes out most Muslims.
This is the reality of the situation. No use believing in fairy tales.
Whiskey,
Just a quibble, but I don’t think that I would consider Byzantine society “secular.” Original home of Orthodox Christianity, and they are the only people to work the Nicaean Creed into an epic poem (“Diogenis Akrites”)…Probably a better example out there to illustrate your point, I think.
OT Interlude Bethany
The fairy tale is the one told by the serpent. The fundamental battle is between the forces that acknowledge a hierarchy, with God at the pinnacle and those that see Man as capable of taking care of things on his own.
Unfortunately, Islam seems to be vulnerable to falling into the latter category. It appears to be infected by a pathogen that encourages man to project his own desires and perceptions onto God and then to take matters into his own hands, fervently believing that he is sanctioned from above when the opposite is true.
I posted this comment once before here at Belmont Club. But given the context of the current post, I think it is worth repeating again.
(Observation 1) Every society has its share of violent, misogynistic, hurtful and etc. people, a number of who will always try and bend their religion to serve as a cover, excuse or justification for their behavior. As a result, all religions have had their fringe cults and sects that have acted out in violent and/or other anti-social ways; that’s just a sad fact of human nature. But Islam, of all of the world’s major religions, seems to be the one most troubled by this problem, while at the same time; the more peaceful (moderate) element in the religion of Islam is seemingly powerless to stop this co-opting from happening.
(Observation 2) It doesn’t matter what verses of the Bible or Koran one chooses to emphasize, or how one may try to interpret them. The ultimate arbiter of what is or what is not a proper Christian or Muslim response is the lives and works of Jesus or Mohammed themselves. Jesus was above all, a man of peace, while Mohammed was anything but a man of peace.
A Christian may try to use scripture to justify or incite others to violence, but because Jesus himself would not have acted in that way, their words will never attract more than a handful of listeners.
But it is the converse that is true for Islam. While there may be many within the Muslim religion that want to live peacefully with their neighbors, Mohammed himself did not live that way. As a result, the voices of the “moderates” carry no weight with the community of Islam as a whole. After all, how can one Muslim, with any authority, tell another not to do what Mohammed himself did do? It’s not that the moderates can’t or won’t speak out against the radical element, it’s that the prophet Mohammed, by the example of his own life, left them with no voice to speak out with.
(Conclusion) That’s why Islam is not, never was or can ever be trusted to be a “religion of peace”. Because Mohammed himself was not a peaceful man and by the example of his own life, he has left the door wide open for the more violent element in any community or society, in which Islam is the dominant religion, to turn Islam into a tool to justify their violent actions against others.
In other words, Islam, as a religion, can’t be any more “peaceful” than, as a man, Mohammed was himself.
Whiskey, you can drop the polygamy angle. The only difference between Muslim societies and Oriental or Occidental societies is that polygamy is legal there. The rate at which it occurs is pretty much the same the world over.
There’s a good reason for that too. Across all peoples both men and women exhibit a bell curve of intelligence and social ability but women’s bell curve is tighter with short tails. They bunch around the average, while men show a lot more variation. That means that in any generation the number of women with the ability to ably raise children will outnumber the men with equal ability, and every generation will have a number of men that never marry and a number of men that are far enough above average that they can support more than one wife.
Further, Occidental cultures practice serial-polygamy. Get married, have kids, get divorced, repeat. The only difference between that and Saudi Arabia is that the Saudis skip the “get divorced” step.
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On your other point though, you’d probably be interested in knowing that China has one of the largest growing Christian populations. Catholicism is doing quite well there.
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As for the third man in the room, he’s got influence today, but no staying power. As Spengler (the pseudonymous Asia Times writer, not the original) has noted, any culture that takes up secularism as its religion forgets to reproduce. If today’s trends continue (not that they will, but that’s not the point) a few centuries from now Europe and Siberia will collapse inwards and the world will be inherited by Catholic Africa and Asia, Islamnic Central Asia, Hindustan and whatever Great Awakening is sweeping the USA at the time.
@Maineman #10: Darned good insight there.
The saying “Man proposes but Allah disposes”
gets turned around into “Man proposes and Allah disposes”. The critical difference are those two conjunctives: “But” in this case is the polar opposite of “and”. In the latter, the will of the mortal determines the actions of the god.
I do not know how all this gets said in Arabic, but I’ll bet the same semantics are at play.
Now, does this affect all Muslims or only those in Arabia/Persia? Bosnia Muslims seem to be more squared away and Wretchard can vouch for a few Moros. So my money is on the pathogen being centered in the mideast.
@ 12. Brock
Two minor nitpicks.
1. The polygamy in China, until 1930′s was not serial. One may call it “mistressiate”. For all practical purposes, it was a marriage with as many mistresses as the male could afford, but it was governed by rather a custom tailored business type of contract of parties involved, than by a tradition.
2. One century from now, there won’t be any other religion than Islam (bare token christian dhimi populations maintained for some types of slavery arrangements), or there won’t be any Islam.
<blockquote<2. One century from now, there won’t be any other religion than Islam (bare token christian dhimi populations maintained for some types of slavery arrangements), or there won’t be any Islam.The West has far too much conscience to kill every Muslim in the world. If the West survives by “defeating” Islam, whatever that may mean, it won’t be by wiping it out completely.
Hell, we haven’t completely wiped out Naziism, and Communism is still the official policy and goal of a number of governments and the unofficial policy of many more, including arguably our own. See for example Maxine Waters.
@ 15. njcommuter
The West has far too much conscience to kill every Muslim in the world
Why you presume I am talking about killing every muslim? Deicide would be far more effective.
I think the Pope wants us civilians to keep on dying quietly at Muslim hands while he picks his battles and is diplomatic. I wish he’d be a little more militant in his speaking out — a little more black and white — and not so diplomatic that imams around the world can take his words and say, “see? the biggest Catholic thinks we’re worth talking to and respecting so why don’t the rest of you?”
Surely the Pope should be able to recognize and name a terrorist when he sees one.
If there is any question whether or not the war in Iraq is won and they can manage their own democracy without the oversight of American troops, the stories coming out about the spontaneous beating of the Iraqi shoe-thrower by Iraqi “police” should put paid to that. Guy’s reported ot have broken rib(s), broken arm, injured and hemorraging eye, and internal bleeding.
I don’t really have a problem with him feeling a little pain in return for his attack on our President, but wonder at the lack of discipline among Iraq’s “soldiers” and “police”, who evidently have rock-hard barbarian directly under an extremely thin veneer of civilization donned when American troop are around.
I hope someone is looking very deeply at these people before allowing them into our country as refugees.
“Genuine love of neighbor implies respect of the person and her or his choices in matters of conscience and religion. It includes the right of individuals and communities to practice their religion in private and public.”
The Muslims signed on to this. Let’s see how soon Catholic churches are built in Saudi Arabia.
Benedict is stopping short of provocation in his public statements re Islam. My guess is that will not continue from the Papacy if Muslim countries do not make a genuine effort to implement the right of religious expression they have agreed to.
Benedict is above all an historian. I suspect his time frame may be generational.
Enter D’Souza, and with him his thesis that it is secular, humanistic society, with its rampant hedonism and disregard for tradition, that Islam is warring against. Not “America” per se.
I never understood the anger that D’Souza earned from conservatives for publishing his thesis. I thought he was spot on.
I have traveled in Muslim countries extensively, and annoyance at flashes of public indecency, like Janet Jackson’s breast flashing on-screen during a Super Bowl half-time show, unite most traditional, conservative cultures alike.
Social conservatives of all religious and ethnic backgrounds should re-read Dinesh’s book. I think it deserves a second look as we enter phase II of the GWOT, and move into phase X of America’s “Culture Wars.”
Maybe the “Culture War” isn’t only an American civil dispute. According to Dinesh and Pope Benedict, our internal war is actually a global one.
Math and Magic A couple of interesting posts at Strategy Page show how information technology has helped turn the tide in Iraq, and how it may do the same in Afghanistan — if we have the patience.
In Iraq, video monitoring and mathematical pattern analysis have been very helpful in the largely successful struggle against improvised explosive devices (IEDs). Pictures of frequently traveled sites are examined regularly by both computer software and live soldiers, and if either one sees anything out of the ordinary, they can call in the bomb squad (EOD — Explosive Ordnance Disposal) to clear the way before sending out a convoy. This system has led to the death of over 3,000 terrorists caught in the act of setting up roadside bombs, or lying in wait to set them off and attack their victims with gunfire. Hundreds more terrorists were captured, and many thousands of roadside bombs were avoided or destroyed before they could go off.
And there’s more.
Analysts collect all sorts of data from the field and crunch the numbers to predict, with a high degree of accuracy, which routes are most likely to be under attack on a given day. Personnel can then be extra vigilant and take added precautions. This is the same sort of mathematics used by Wall Street “quants” to find financial patterns that they can exploit; marketers use it to decide which catalogs to stuff your mailbox with. However important those applications may be, it’s good to know that it also saves lives.
Meanwhile, in view of the recent news from Afghanistan, the headline
“Two More Years of Magic Will Do It”
at first seems sarcastic, but it’s quite serious — and clear-eyed but hopeful. The article says that while Afghanistan will never become as tranquil as a Connecticut suburb, the Taliban is vulnerable to a war of attrition, because the good guys’ firepower is so vastly superior:
[The Taliban] can still entice poor, but adventurous, country boys to come along and raise some hell. And usually get killed by smart bombs the star struck kids cannot comprehend. Meanwhile, more and more of the tribes are getting a clue and making peace with the central government. . . .The foreign generals believe it will take another year or two of smart bomb magic to kill enough thrill seeking tribesmen, to get all the tribes on board.
The math is simple; the foreign troops can kill Afghans much better than the other way around.
Even the most pro-Taliban tribes eventually come to realize that, and live with it. The country will not be peaceful at that point. There will still be the drug gangs and bandits (groups of armed tribesmen out of steal or settle some feud). But that’s been going on for thousands of years, and won’t change until the national police get themselves pulled together. That will take another generation or two. . . .
The Taliban continue to get slaughtered whenever they mass..
8,000 year old middle eastern shepherds religion.
2,000 year old middle eastern reincarnation religion.
800 year old middle eastern death religion.
what do all these have in common?
These are all MIDDLE EASTERN religions, last time I looked most European and European descendents are not MIDDLE eastern yet time after time these religions have spilled out of the middle east and invaded and supplanted native culture and native religions.
Is there a possible way to send all these middle eastern religions back where they came from?
No, and that’s a damned shame.
Whiskey: Islam wants to rule, everything, and must to deal with it’s young men who are in excess supply due to polygamy.
The flaw in your theory is the female suicide bomber.
The flaw in Islam is not that it is “infected by a pathogen” that lets men project their wants and desires onto it, because Mohammad projected his own wants and desires onto the Q’u'r’a'n from the gitgo. No, the flaw in Islam is they have no Muslim “Pope” to pronounce the definitive interpretation. In Islam there is no equivalent to Catholicism, only a kind of Protestantism where every Iman is his own Pope. There’s no one to enforce the non-killing-fellow-Muslim rule because they can find an Iman somewhere who says Muslims who don’t help kill Westerners aren’t true Muslims and they can be killed in turn.
If you were to get an English translation of the Qur’an (make it a copy that you won’t need to keep, except as an example of this exercise)and slowly going through it you white out all the surahs that are violent, misogynistic, immoral, amoral, archaic, and stupid, what you have left will be very slender. With what you have left, would it be Islam? Now, for Muslims to be able to even contemplate doing this, they would have to jettison their long tradition that the words of the Qur’an are a divine dictation: eternal, uncreated, perfect, literal words of Allah.
This is what must happen for Islam to be rendered pacified by its own hand.
Anyone want to set up the odds for this scenario?
Every religion that I know of except Islam promotes in one form or another peace and an attempt to co-exist with your neighbor. At some point Islam will overstep its bounds with a true heinous act (maybe nuke San Fransisco) and the west will kill all the Mussellmen. We can only wish it will not be so.
I would say that nuking San Francisco is a feature, not a bug.
Last month you wanted Berkeley to go, Nahncee now it’s a town across the Bay with seven times more people. Do you have a peculiar fetish to see American lives lost? Why not just call for the Jihad to nuke the whole Boston-Atlanta Metropolitan Axis? There must be a hunnert million Americans there.
X3NA: I would say that Islam is prone to pathogen infection because it lacks a Papal vaccine.
The Pope doesn’t make definitive pronouncements for a fairly large chunk of Christianity. Protestants and Orthodox Christians might take an interest in what the Pope may say simply because of his public prominence and leadership of the Roman catholic chunk, but as far as doctrinal and political matters we look to the Scriptures and our own traditions for guidance, not the Bishop of Rome….
X3NA (#23): “No, the flaw in Islam is they have no Muslim “Pope” to pronounce the definitive interpretation.”
With aplogies to Nahncee (#26) for using “feature not a bug” the second time, it is indeed a feature of Islam to not have a center. A distributed network is more robust than a centralized one.
The pope is likely quite aware of the true nature of Islam and of its ultimate evil goal — as well as the various tactics and concepts that its followers use to make people think they can negotiate reasonably with Islam. They will lie and deceive in order to get in a position from which they can behead, literally and figuratively. If you hear anything different, you are being deceived. The only Muslims who will be dissuaded from violence are those who don’t really buy the whole thing to begin with.
And Bob, you misrepresent the attitude of Catholicism. The Catholic Church does not feel that it cannot rest until the whole world is Catholic. No, we believe that Christ calls all unto Himself and that He grants each person the freedom to come to Him or not, as that person chooses.
Happy Hannukah and Merry Christmas!
Pastor Rick Warren challenged to reconsider participation in inaugural ceremonies
http://www.catholicnewsagency.com/new.php?n=14673
Front Royal, Va, Dec 20, 2008 / 08:41 pm (CNA).- President of Human Life International, Fr. Thomas J. Euteneuer, has challenged Pastor Rick Warren to rethink his participation in the inaugural ceremonies for President-elect Barack Obama. Rev. Warren, a strong supporter of both the pro-life movement and traditional marriage, was chosen to give the invocation at Obama’s inauguration next month.
In a statement, Fr. Euteneuer applauded Warren, the pastor at Saddleback Church in Lake Forest, California, for his pro-life leadership, but expressed concern “that his high-profile and explicitly Christian prayerful invocation at President-elect Obama’s inauguration may be perceived as an endorsement, even a blessing, of what will likely be the most anti-life administration in the history of this country.”
Rev. Warren is also the author of the best-selling book “The Purpose Driven Life.”
“President-elect Obama has given every indication that he has no respect for the lives of the unborn, and whenever given the opportunity, has promised to enforce the most extreme demands of anti-life groups,” continued Fr. Euteneuer. “This extremist agenda should not be seen to have the endorsement of pro-life leaders such as Pastor Warren.”
“I respect the personal relationship that Pastor Warren has with Mr. Obama,” said Father Euteneuer. “But such a public and explicitly Christian endorsement as this invocation is certainly confusing to those who know Mr. Obama’s record on life issues.
“We respectfully ask Pastor Warren to reconsider his participation in the inaugural ceremonies, given Mr. Obama’s extremist anti-life views,” the Human Life International president concluded.
Y’know, Islam had a centralized Pope/Commander-in-chief for almost all of its history … up til World War I, if memory serves. The caliph …
They want to reinstate the Caliphate, get back their Pope and Commander-in-chief (in one, like Mohammed).
We live in interesting times.
Take care & God bless
WF