Pope Benedict XVI and Islam: Allah the Irrational
A little more than eight months ago, on September 12, 2006, Pope Benedict XVI delivered his now-infamous Regensburg Address. The reaction in the Muslim world was swift and severe, including protests, violence, and the murder of a nun—all over the Holy Father’s citation of a late-14th-century Byzantine emperor, Manuel II Paleologus. In a dialogue on Christianity and Islam, the emperor had rhetorically asked an educated Persian to “Show me just what Mohammed brought that was new, and there you will find things only evil and inhuman, such as his command to spread by the sword the faith he preached.”
Lost in the uproar was the reason for Pope Benedict’s citation of the emperor, which was expressed in the further quotation that the Holy Father offered from the dialogue. The emperor put his remark into context by explaining that “God is not pleased by blood—and not acting reasonably is contrary to God’s nature. Faith is born of the soul, not the body. Whoever would lead someone to faith needs the ability to speak well and to reason properly, without violence and threats . . . To convince a reasonable soul, one does not need a strong arm, or weapons of any kind, or any other means of threatening a person with death . . . “
Many sympathetic commentators, who didn’t bother to read the speech, concluded that the main point of Benedict’s address was to denounce the use of violence in the service of religion. That is certainly a good secondary lesson to take from his remarks, but the full text makes it very clear that Benedict, like the emperor, was using the example of violence simply to introduce his broader point: that “not to act in accordance with reason is contrary to God’s nature.” And this draws into focus a nearly insurmountable problem for any dialogue between Christianity and Islam because, as Benedict continued, in Islam, Allah’s “will is not bound up with any of our categories, even that of rationality.” (By “categories,” he means philosophical categories of Western thought.)
For a dialogue to take place, three conditions are necessary:
First, both sides must be interested in pursuing the truth, which requires acknowledging that there is such a thing as truth and that it can be known (or at least approached) through reason.
Second, both sides must represent their own positions truthfully (which also requires that those positions be expressed rationally), and without any intent to deceive. And
Third, each side must be able to take the other’s claims at face value, as truly representing the other’s position.
On each of these points, the Islamic conception of Allah presents a stumbling block. The work of the noted Muslim theologian and scholar Ibn Hazm is often presented as proof of what Northwestern University Professor Dario Fernandez-Morera has called ”The Andalusian Myth”—namely, that the high point of civilization on the Iberian peninsula occurred during the centuries of Muslim occupation. As Benedict points out, however, “Ibn Hazm went so far as to state that [Allah] is not bound even by his own word, and that nothing would oblige him to reveal the truth to us.” Allah is, in the end, pure will, not bound by reason—in other words, capriciousness is essential to his very nature. “Were it [Allah’s] will,” Benedict continues, “we would even have to practise idolatry.”
Most of us have not had anything approaching the theological training of Benedict XVI, so we may be tempted to dismiss his concerns as something that could only be of interest to a theologian. After all, how likely is it that the average believer—Muslim or Christian—could even fully grasp the differences between the Christian conception of the Godhead and the Muslim conception of Allah, let alone allow his behavior to be affected by such differences?
Perhaps we can begin to understand the importance that these differences hold for even the average believer by approaching this from a slightly different angle.
In De Potentia, St. Thomas Aquinas contrasts the Muslim view of physical causality with the Christian one, pointing out that Muslims believe that Allah interposes himself at every point in the chain of causality, while Christians believe that natural objects can act under their own power. Contemporary writers, such as Fr. Stanley Jaki, have argued that this Muslim misconception of natural causality is the primary reason science developed in Christian Europe but remained stunted in Muslim societies (the claims of current public-school textbooks and PBS propaganda specials notwithstanding).
Few people, however, have explored the moral implications of the Muslim understanding of physical causality. To take Aquinas’s example, if I were to take this lighter and apply the flame to this sheet of paper, everyone in this room would assume that, everything being normal, the paper would ignite—and it does. It took no special act of God to cause the paper to burn; in fact, all other things being equal, it would have required His intervention to prevent a fire, just as He intervened when Nebuchanezzer threw the three youths into the furnace. According to the Muslim view, however, when I strike the lighter, Allah has to decide whether the flint will spark, and whether the spark will ignite the fuel. When I apply the flame to the paper, Allah must decide whether the paper will ignite. If it does catch fire, it is because Allah willed that each in this series of natural acts would occur; if it does not, it is because Allah willed that the paper would not burn.
So we conclude that Muslims have a non-Western, non-Christian notion of physical causality. So what? Well, what if this weren’t a lighter, but an airplane? And what if this weren’t a sheet of paper, but one of the towers of the World Trade Center? Then, if the plane, being applied to the tower, were to cause it to burst into flames and crumble to the ground, it would not happen because the hollow steel structure of the tower created a chimney that caused an implosion, or because changes in environmental regulations prevented the use of asbestos above the 76th floor, but only because Allah willed that the tower would burst into flames and crumble to the ground. The complete capriciousness of Allah with respect to the physical world leads to a moral fatalism. If Allah did not want the towers to fall, he would not have made them fall. To Muslims who understand this--both in the United States and worldwide--the fact that the towers fell was a clear signal that Allah approved of the actions of the September 11 hijackers.
This moral fatalism helps to explain why many American Muslims—even some of those who seemed genuinely horrified by what had occurred—were unable or unwilling to condemn the September 11 attacks directly. If Allah approved the actions of the hijackers by causing the towers to fall, then to condemn the September 11 attacks is essentially an act of impiety. It is one of the many ironies of Islam that the Muslim insistence on the radical freedom of the will can lead to a moral fatalism which those who wish to wage jihad against the United States can use in order to silence dissent among their fellow Muslims.
Just as Christians believe that we are made in the image and likeness of God, Muslims see themselves as a reflection of Allah. And as we wish to conform our will to God’s Will, they attempt to conform their wills to Allah. But here, the similarities end. If Allah’s will, unlike God’s, is not bound up with rationality, then the discerning of that will takes a very different shape. In attempting to understand God’s Will, Christians can turn to the world around us, to natural law, to history, to tradition. We see the rationality—the consistent reasonableness—of God’s Will in the world that He created. But in Islam, the appearance of order is only that—an appearance. To the extent that the created world seems rational, it is only because Allah wishes it to appear so. His will could change at any moment, however—and the new order, or lack thereof, that he would create would be just as “right” as this one.
Which brings us back to Regensburg. Pope Benedict’s address was only 16 paragraphs long; and contrary to the impression given by the media, only the first four paragraphs directly concerned Islam. The other 12 are a philosophical and historical meditation on, in the Holy Father’s words, “the profound harmony between what is Greek in the best sense of the word and the biblical understanding of faith in God.” Turning to Saint John the Evangelist, Pope Benedict declares that John “spoke the final word on the biblical concept of God” when he declared that “In the beginning was the logos, and the logos is God.” In other words, the final word on the biblical concept of God is a Greek word, and one of paramount importance in Greek philosophy. In English translations of this passage, we normally render logos as word: “In the beginning was the Word.” But logos, Pope Benedict reminds us, also means reason. “In the beginning was Reason"—not the modern, narrow, scientific conception of reason, which places reason at odds with faith, but the classical and medieval conception of reason, which accepts faith as the “evidence of things not seen.”
Much has been made in recent years of the global demographic shift in the Church, to the east and to the south; and Pope Benedict himself, as Cardinal Ratzinger, has written eloquently about what this will likely mean for the future of the Church. But at Regensburg, his comments called to mind the words of Hilaire Belloc, who declared that “The Faith is Europe and Europe is the Faith.” “[W]ith the subsequent addition of the Roman heritage,” Benedict declared, the convergence between biblical faith and Greek philosophical inquiry “created Europe and remains the foundation of what can rightly be called Europe.” The influence flows the other way, too: Benedict spoke of “the intrinsic necessity of a rapprochement between Biblical faith and Greek inquiry,” and stated without hesitation that “The encounter between the Biblical message and Greek thought did not happen by chance.” He referred to the Septuagint—"the Greek translation of the Old Testament produced at Alexandria"—as “an independent textual witness and a distinct and important step in the history of revelation, one which brought about this encounter in a way that was decisive for the birth and spread of Christianity.”
Most of the rest of the address is dedicated to showing that, in Benedict’s words, “the fundamental decisions made about the relationship between faith and the use of human reason are part of the faith itself; they are developments consonant with the nature of faith itself.” In other words, Greek philosophy is intrinsic to Christianity. It is not something grafted on, something that can be tossed aside lightly as we spread the Gospel among nations who, unlike us, are not direct heirs of the Greeks. To do so is to attempt to cleave the very logos itself—to sunder reason and the Word.
That cleft, however, is fundamental to Islamic theology, so much so that to refer to it as theology—reasoning about God—is a misuse of the term. It is a commonplace to refer to Muslims, Jews, and Christians as “Peoples of the Book,” but strictly speaking, that phrase really applies only to Muslims, because, for them, all that can be known about Allah is what he has chosen to reveal directly—and then only until that revelation is contradicted by further revelation, as occurs within the Koran itself. By sundering reason and the Word, Islam creates a very modern (and false) opposition between faith and reason. It is no surprise, then, that Jewish political philosopher Leo Strauss arrives at his understanding of the radical opposition between faith and reason through his study of Arab interpreters of Plato and Aristotle. Nor, sadly, is it any surprise that a Catholic follower of Strauss would recently write that “if as the Pope says ‘we must not lose sight of God if we do not want human dignity to disappear,’ one must be open to the possibility that in His Providence it may be Islam which is destined to restore that sight to a Europe ‘hollowed out’ by secularism.”
G.K. Chesterton predicted the rise of such men a century ago in his satirical novel, The Flying Inn. Intellectually stunted by a modern, narrow conception of reason, they have lost sight of the logos as anything but Word, and their version of Christianity, if can even be called that, becomes an abstraction that is closer to Islam than to the historic Christian Faith. The loss of the classical and medieval conception of reason undermines both Europe and the Faith; the destruction of Europe undermines both the Faith and reason; and the undermining of the Faith makes the revival of both reason and Europe a near impossibility.
What we’re left with, instead, is the capricious exercise of power in the modern world, which only a capricious god such as Allah seems able to restrain. But that restraint would come at a price: the human freedom that a Christian Europe made possible.
Cardinal Ratzinger, in his 1996 book Salt of the Earth, warned of that very possibility. The Koran, he wrote,
is a total religious law, which regulates the whole of political and social life and insists that the whole order of life be Islamic. Sharia shapes society from beginning to end. In this sense, it can exploit such freedoms as our constitutions give, but it cannot be its final goal to say: Yes, now we too are a body with rights, now we are present [in society] just like the Catholics and the Protestants. In such a situation, [Islam] would not achieve a status consistent with its inner nature; it would be in alienation from itself.
Where Islam is in power, it must dominate, to the exclusion of any other faith. The God of Christianity loves man, so much so that He sent His only Son to die for us; and He wants us to love Him in return, freely and unreservedly. Allah, in his capriciousness, demands total submission to his will, and so sharia is not a law of love, but of fear. For Christians, the fear of God is only the beginning of wisdom; it is charity—love—which is the bond of perfection.
At Regensburg, in a passage criticizing Christian thinkers who took the voluntarism of Blessed John Duns Scotus too far, Pope Benedict summed up the problem posed by the Muslim conception of Allah quite nicely: “God does not become more divine when we push him away from us in a sheer, impenetrable voluntarism; rather, the truly divine God is the God who has revealed himself as logos and, as logos, has acted and continues to act lovingly on our behalf.”
Is there, then, any hope for a true dialogue between Christianity and Islam? Yes, and it lies in the fact that, in one sense (and perhaps in this sense alone), all men are created equal: God, in His love and mercy, has written His Law on their hearts. Muslims, like all men, no matter what they believe dogmatically, do not live each day as if Allah is capricious, as if the world could be remade at any moment and what was wrong will become right, and what is right will become wrong. Their recognition of this law may be veiled, as St. Paul, in Second Corinthians, declared of the children of Israel: “12 Having therefore such hope, we use much confidence: 13 And not as Moses put a veil upon his face, that the children of Israel might not steadfastly look on the face of that which is made void. 14 But their senses were made dull. For, until this present day, the selfsame veil, in the reading of the old testament, remaineth not taken away (because in Christ it is made void). 15 But even until this day, when Moses is read, the veil is upon their heart. 16 But when they shall be converted to the Lord, the veil shall be taken away.”
Pope Benedict understands that this inescapable fact of human nature gives us hope. At Regensburg, he invited not only Muslims but all of us to take the first step in revealing the law of God written on our hearts by awakening ourselves to the harmony of faith and reason—not the modern, narrow, abstract reason of the post-Christian West which has so much in common with the rejection of reason in Islam, but the reason of classical Greece and Rome and medieval Christendom. “It is to this great logos, to this breadth of reason,” Pope Benedict declared, “that we invite our partners in the dialogue of cultures.”
What he did not say, but which he clearly knows, is that, if our Muslim interlocutors do embrace this reason and reject their own voluntaristic conception of Allah, the dialogue not only can start but will be well under way: because, to return to the early paragraphs of Benedict’s speech, that reason is the Logos, and the Logos is with God, and the Logos is God. Entered into with the intention of seeking the truth, this dialogue ends only in conversion to Christ, the eternal Logos, the unity of Reason and Word.
“And the Logos was made flesh, and dwelt among us, (and we saw his glory, the glory as it were of the only begotten of the Father,) full of grace and truth.”
Scott P. Richert is Executive Editor of Chronicles Magazine.
Comments
This Scott Richert article is a gem. As I was reading it, I was thinking of former students and various contacts to whom I need to send the link because Richert here says wonderfully many things I have emphasized more clumsily.
Pope Benedict’s emphasis on the right translation of ‘Logos,’ and what that means for the Faith, is something that all Christians need to take to heart and mind. That is not something that the horde of quickie commentators on the Regensburg Address tend to examine.
Perhaps foremost, I am pleased that Richert makes the connection between Belloc’s declaration that the Faith is Europe and Europe the Faith and Benedict’s emphasis on Greek philosophy. Absolutely, “Greek philosophy is intrinsic to Christianity.” Pull out Greek philosophy, specifically those of Plato and Aristotle, and you end up with all kinds of heresies run amuck and that tend to be defended irrationally.
Where I would like to see Richert, or others, go with this is to compare the capriciousness of the Mohammedan god with the capriciousness of Talmudic god and then compare the pair to the Fertility Cult gods of the child sacrifice Semites.
Is the matter one basically of Greek-led intellectual and moral European culture versus Semitic culture, the former being necessary to non-heretical Christianity and its healthy culture, the latter standing against Christianity and its healthy culture in sundry forms, demanding to Semitize both? Is that the reason that even mild Judaizing produces poisonous fruit that kills orthodox Christianity and healthy Christian culture?
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Whenever I mention the hypocrisy of Catholic Church, my post is immediately eliminated, as though the silence is the only ‘rational’ answer.
My mantra consists of the following question :
If it is wrong, as Papa preaches, to ‘spread by the sword the faith he (Mohammed)preaches’ why was it not wrong to convert forcefully more than 200 thousand of Serbian Orthodox population into Catholicism during the WWII, after the wholesale slaughter of Serbs in Croacia by the Croatian Nazies?
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As always, an excellent essay by Mr. Richert. Two comments. We need to be a little wary of the uses that are made of the “Europe is the faith” slogan. In practical terms, in this day and age, “defense of the West” too often means recruiting Christians to spread an atheistic secular liberalism throughout the world. The other comment has to do with Mr. Richert’s observations about how Moslems ignore secondary causality and attribute everything directly to God. Another Catholic writer, whose name escapes me at the moment, makes the same observation with respect to fundamentalist Protestantism. This may be due to the latter’s over-reliance on the Old Testament and the Lutheran repudiation of the efficacy of good works, in other words of human secondary causality in the supernatural order.
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I think it incumbent upon Peter RV to give us a fuller explanation of the “forced” conversion of Orthodox Serbs during WWII. Was the forced conversion authorized by the Catholic Church? If it wasn’t, who did the forcing? Did Rome condemn those who forced the Serbs to convert? Men can be hypocrites, history is rife with many examples, but I take umbrage when a person calls the Catholic Church, the Mystical Body of Christ, hypocritical.
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Apropos of the Pope’s comment, quoted by Mr. Richert, to the effect that the Koran “is a total religious law, which regulates the whole of political and social life...” - we should stop to think that one of the blessings of Christianity is that it is not a legalistic religion. Jesus replaced the complex legalistic structure of Pharasaical Judaism with but two commandments - to love the Lord thy God, and to love thy neighbor as thyself.
As it spread, consequently, Christianity did not attempt to destroy and replace the systems of secular law that were customary in the societies that became Christian. Thus, the laws of the Romans, of the Salic Franks, of the Celts, or of the Scandinavians, were allowed to continue in use amongst those peoples, with only as much modification as was necessary to reflect the abandonment of paganism. Matters such as title to land, the relationship of man and wife, or of master and servant, or the succession of heirs to the estate of a decedent, were left outside the purview of the Church.
The combination of Islamic legalism and fatalism explains why, despite propaganda about the “Andalusian Myth,” and the supposed glories of Abbasid Baghdad, no Islamic society ever developed anything like Magna Charta. The neoconservative project of trying to transplant Western “freedoms” into such an environment, even if it really meant the historic Anglo-American ideal of ordered liberty, would have about as much chance of success as an effort to plant roses in Antarctica.
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Fair questions Mr Meng.
Here are the answers:
Slaughter ofthe Serbs started in 1941 when Yugoslavia was defeated by the forces of Axes. The Croatian Ustashi (Croatian para-military units) carried out a systematic masacre of Serbian peasantry on the teritory of the newly formed Croatian quisling state(NDH). The slaughter was so appalling that even Germans were taken aghast (this is documented in Wehrmacht war archives).
Serbian population was so terrorized that
part of them were forced to convert, to save their lives.
The archibishop of Zagreb Alojz Stepinac, not only did not offer any protection to the Serbs, but has allowed his priests to be part of the Ustashi units.
Stepinac was jailed by the Communists (Tito),as a Nazi collaborator, Pius XII, however, promoted him to the rang of Cardinal.
Ante Pavelic, Ustashi’s boss and perhaps the bloodiest butcher of the WWII, escaped to Argentina thanks to an underground chain of some catholic priests and monks.(He was an interesting character,- it is enough to read an interview of his, with the Italian writer Curzio Malaparte, to realize that Hitler was a humanitarian compared to him).
Some half a million Serbs perished in that holocaust ,litterally under the knife of Catholics, without any recognition and never mind an appology from the ‘Mystical Body of Christ’
(BTW, Orthodox are also Christians)
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I was one of those fortunate enough to be in the audience when Mr. Richert delivered this column in the form of a speech. It neatly and eloquently summarized the problems of dialog between Christianity and Islam. What is at the bottom of this is that the notion that both faiths worship the same God is simply not true. It is likely that there is no human way to bridge the gap between these different conceptions of the Deity.
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In summary....
my VOODOO with chicken sacrifices is better than your VOODOO with turkey sacrifices…
just brilliant.....
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Islam has no Philosophical argument with either Judaism or Christianity about the concept of God(Allah) or anything else.
The word “Allah” is nothing more than arabic for “God”.
I quote surah Al-Baqarah verse 136 from The Holy Quran:
“Say (O Muslims): We believe in Allah and that which is revealed unto us and that which was revealed unto Abraham, and Ishmael, and Isaac, and Jacob, and the tribes, and that which Moses and Jesus received, and that which the Prophets received from their Lord. We make no distinction between any of them, and unto Him we have surrendered.”
That is why Pat Buchanan has observed that Islam is nothing more than achristian sect.
The Popes’ argument is based on a complete falsehood. Nowhere in Islam is there any justification for spreading religion by war. War is hated and struggle or “Jehad” is only permissable in the face of absolute tryanny such as being faced by the Palestinians for the last 60 years. That is why 9/11 was nothing more than blowback for 60 years of wars of aggression, ethnic cleansing and genocide, and would have occurred even if the Palestinians and arabs were Buddhist monks.
The notion of fatalism is frowned upon in Islam in too many place to enumerate, even fortune telling is explicitly forbidden.
Islamic law is an ultimate expression of rationality and humanity. It reflected a Giant leap for mankind sunk in ignorance 1400 years ago. It abolished slavery, gave women equality and established a code of personal conduct and morality un-equaled before or after.
The actions of arab, turkish or Mughal conquerors cannot be laid at the door of Islam. There is no equivalent in Islam to the history of Judea christianity that permitted the most devastating and completed genocide in recorded history against the natives of north america and the jews in Europe.
Islams history cannot be denied. It promoted the advancement of knowledge. Modern algebra, mathematics, astronomy, navigation, medical science, architecture and engineering, reached great heights while Europe was plunged in the “dark ages” Islam saved the knowledge of the greek civilization..... and practised tolerance, allowing the Christians and Jews of Europe to flourish for 700 years under muslim rule.
The Popes’ attitude of thinly disguised hubris is precisely what periodically leads Judeo-christian culture to calamities like the genocide in north america, the holocaust in germany or the ethnic cleansing in Palestine.
His current position provides the philosophical attitudes that permit the sociopaths that run the west to plot a new holacaust being prepared for Iran while the genocide in Iraq is progressing nicely.
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Dear Peter RV,
Yes, you have given some facts, but none of it implicates the Catholic Church, which you called hypocrital. There is no doubt that the Ante Pavelic regime was bloodthirsty, especially, toward the Serbs. And yes, there were some renegade Catholics involved. However, I reiterate, there is no individual, or group of individuals, that is the Catholic Church. If I should create a scandal, it doesn’t follow that it comes with the approbation of the Catholic Church. Therefore, you have failed to prove that the Catholic Church approved or abetted the forced conversions of Orthodox Serbs. I will add this: “According to a report of the British Naval Intelligence Division from 1944, the Croatian ‘Roman Catholic clergy, following the example of monsignor Stepinac, the Zagreb Archbishop, energetically protested against ustasha persecutions of Serbs and Jews, as well as against government’s attempts for forced coversion to Roman Catholicism...’” It sounds like you have an axe to grind and that it is definitely anti-Catholicism, having nothing to do with historical fact. I am wondering if you are either an orthodox extremist or a communist agent.
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Oh...good...God.
Let me simplify all this, by simply pointing out that today’s Chinese Communist Party is deadly similar to Islam.
And today, in these times, the Chinese Communist Party is working very fast and
furiously, to make common cause with the Muslim fanatics who are avowedly mortal enemies of Christendom and of Christian civilisation.
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As an American of Croatian descent (although my ancestors left while it was still under the happy crown of the benevolent Habsburgs) I am deeply ashamed of the minority terrorist regime which
the Nazi and Italian occupiers appointed to rule the newly created Croatian state in 1941. Millions of Croats, weary of Serbian domination, DID flock to its
banners--at first. Then-Archbishop Stepinac DID meet with its leaders, and at first regard it as an
acceptable regime. His approval turned to horror as he saw that Pavelic and his murderous supporters were intent on USING Catholicism as nothing more than a tool in the creation of a totalitarian nationalism modeled on the German regime. He condemned the slaughters, ordered his priests not to cooperate with the regime,
and made efforts (historians can argue if he could have done more--Michael Burleigh, in his recent, persuasive history “Sacred Causes” thinks Stepinac
did all he could) to save Jews, Gypsies, and Serbs.
Certainly, the Communist charges against him, trumped up by another totalitarian regime, can hardly be taken as authoritative--any more than those thrown at Cardinal Mindzenty. One can no more condemn the Catholic Church for Pavelic’s actions than one can damn all the Orthodox for the genocide committed
against Ukrainian Catholics by Stalin-- with the aid and support of the Russian Orthodox hierarchy. If one condemns the Vatican for beatifying Stepinac, how should one treat the Orthodox for canonizing Tsar Nicholas II, who presided over numerous pogroms against the Jews, conducted by the “Black Hundred” thugs, who had extensive support among the Orthodox clergy and hierarchy?
The point is not to measure genocides one against the other, but to join together in condemning the use of state power to compel or restrain religious conduct, thereby shaking off these historical
quarrels so that Christians of every variety can unite in the face of the ongoing secular (and impending Islamic) persecution.
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In response to Jon Ball:
By definition: Anyone who hates a Jew or a Christian cannot be a Muslim. This so as the verse I quted should make clear even to the Pope that muslims believe in the Prophethood of Jesus Christ and Moses.
To hate Christian or Jews would make them non-muslims. To insult Jesus or Moses would be Blaspamy.
That is why there have never been forced conversions in muslim history. That is why the Jews and Christians of Spain and Europe under muslim rule for 700 years flourished. The natives of north america were not so lucky.
I grew up in a muslim home where my mother taught me about Moses and Jesus as much as Mohammad.
Extremism in muslim countries is a direct reaction to perceived injustice the root cause is the enslavemant of of The Palestinian people. Hamas and Hezbollah did not exist before Israel’s wars of aggression.
The Taliban did not exist before the Soviet Genocidal war in Afghanistan.
The “Clash of Civilizations” claptrap is an invention of neo nazis often referred to as neocons and can only flourish in the U.S. because its population is the most ignorant in the world. It is nothing more than a smokesreen to justify genocide in Palestine, Iraq, and God (Allah) alone knows who will be next.
Jesus was right “forgive them o Lord they know not what they do”
As far as Chinese support for some Muslim Countries is concerned, lets pray the West never tries to test them or you will end up living in caves again with no Bison to hunt.
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There are so many historical falsehoods and errors of logic in A. A. Ali’s two posts that I almost don’t know where to begin, but I will address what is to me the most egregious of his mis-statements:
“It abolished slavery”
Absolutely false, the exact opposite of the truth. Ali is either a fool or a liar. The Koran contains explicit instructions regarding the institution of slavery. The Arab slave trade lasted longer than the Atlantic slave trade and transported millions of black Africans, particularly from the Sudan, to the Middle East and to North Africa. Eastern Europeans were also enslaved by Muslims. Further, there was no mass movement for the abolition of slavery in the Muslim world, though there were voices raised in opposition to the injustice of the institution and the cruelties of raiding and transportation. Ahmad Bey did abolish slavery in Tunisia in the first half of the nineteenth century, but he did so in his role as a modernizer. I am no fan of imperialism, but it is a fact that the slave trade, both in the Atlantic and the Muslim world, was ended under pressure from the imperial powers, particularly Britain. To this day, slavery persists in the Sudan, and as before it is Muslims enslaving black Africans.
I am not writing this put sole blame upon the Arabs or Muslims in general - God knows there is enough blame to go around, and Christians and Jews share guilt - but Ali’s comments are so blatantly false that I am compelled to respond strongly.
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I will start with the reaction in the Muslim world which was normal given that it was the pope and not some leader of an anemic christian sect . As to the unfortunate murder of a nun, I actually learned that nuns are allowed in Muslim countries, something we would never guess from the western press.
Let ‘s see : The ‘ my god is rational and better lover than yours ’’world has systematically massacred the inhabitants of a whole continent, the Indians of America. then barely 60 years ago has wiped through planned genocide most of the Jews of Europe, dropped atomic bombs on 2 Japanese cities and without being pesky ask you what actually happened to the Muslim populations of Sicily, of Malta and of Spain. where they tolerated? Were they allowed to live in peace? The truth is they did not stand a chance.
Enlightened members of the “people of the book” today brand the more tolerant Muslims whose ancestors have no blood on their hands, committed no genocide, have shown documented tolerance and respect to other religions (Arab Spain is a proof, others are the oldest Christians sects in Iraq, Syria, Egypt, Lebanon who would otherwise never have survived in Latin or Anglo christian sects) as non rational violent brutes, lacking the concept of love. If this is a joke, it in poor taste, it is actually nauseating.
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Response to Michael Morris:
1400 year agos slavery was a central pillar of most economies at the time.
Islam made it illegal for a muslim to enslave another muslim.
Muslims were exhorted to free existing slaves as a path to salvation.
They were advised that slaves have souls and are your equals as human beings, and must be treated with kindness and compassion.
The first call to prayer in the first muslim mosque built by the Prophet, and from the roof of the Ka’ba was recited by a freed slave by the name of Bilal.
This was a giant leap for a society where slavery had been a central pillar.
The intent to phase out slavery is clear to any fair minded rational person.
It was still permitted to hold captives in war, and non-muslims with the afore mentioned exhortations to free them for your own salvation.
What was the Pope doing at the time?
Your comment is a diversion from the central question today:
What has the Pope said recently about the over 2 million Iraqis slaughtered, starved to death and poisoned by the neocon President of the US? The 4 million refugees? What did the Pope say when 6 million Jews were being gased?
The Popes’ Pontifications at this time that my God is better than your Allah is not only a lie, because God is Allah, it serves the same purpose as Mein Kampf did for the Nazis.
Isn’t his pontification designed to
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Mr Zmirak,
Your statements are totally false and could be proved to be so in few lines, but since you practice “ the hit-and-run debate”, you will not let anybody read my answer.
So, I won’t bother again.
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Mr. Peter RV, the Wikipedia article on Archbishop Stepinac pretty much confirms what Mr. Zmirak has stated and in addition he has named another source. I think he has established his point that neither the Catholic Church in general nor the Blessed Stepinac in particular can be held responsible for the crimes of the Ustasha. And how could Mr. Zmirak prevent your answer from being read? Brief and unpersuasive as it is, it has been posted and read.
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Mr.Higdon,
I really do not know who censors this blog, but this is not the first time that my communications are rejected.
I wrote a long answer (without any foul language) to Mr Ming who accused me of being an “orthodox extremist or a communist agent”. It just disappeared.
Then, Mr Zmirak came to charge with some glaring falsities and a tone which left me with impression that my answer to him would also end up in a trashbin.
With you coming on the scene, should I perhaps conclude that I erred entering into a catholic blog not very disposed
to be chalanged in its dogmas?
I mistakenly thought being Taki’s, who is a Greek (orthodox?) I would have no problem in saying few orthodox things on his blog.
If that “small but allert staff” will permit me, I am still disposed to thrash
your delusions about some historical events.
What do you say?
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I thought that Mr. Zmirak’s tone was thoughtful and honest - even fraternal. There have been cases where posts of mine have failed, but I have the impression that this is nothing personal against me, but that some themes are just closed to further comment without prior notice. Perhaps whoever is in charge of that could give such notice. Meanwhile, as long as this theme is open to comment, Mr. RV, say on.
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In fact, no comment on this thread has been censored.
Technical problems arose on the site’s Comments
function mid-week, which prevented some 3 or 4 comments
from appearing until 2 days later. These problems have
(we hope) been rectified. The only comments I remove are those
which entail personal attacks or attacks on
racial or ethnic groups.
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Much of the vaunted Islamic ‘science’ of the middle age was derived from Chinese sources.
“Causality” is one of the main differences between the West and Islam. This story is fully explored in Lawrence R. Brown’s “Might of the West.”
Islamic “philosophy of science” ended with ibn Rushd’s works, obscure to the mullahs.
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Ali –
First of all, thank for acknowledging that your statement was incorrect: Islam did not abolish slavery, though it did codify it and place limitations upon the institution. But you must consider both theory and practice. Islamic slavery in practice did not lead the phasing out of slavery but rather to its expansion, with endless raiding and wars to capture ‘pagans’ and infidels (many of whom, in Africa, were indeed nominally Muslim). The fact that slavery persisted in Muslim lands into the twentieth century (and persists even to this day) speaks for itself.
You speak of “the Pope” as if there is only one. You ask, “What has the Pope said recently about the over 2 million Iraqis slaughtered, starved to death and poisoned by the neocon President of the US? The 4 million refugees?” Well, the former Pope, John Paul II, spoke vigorously and repeatedly against the Iraq war, calling it “a defeat for humanity.” He called upon Catholics to fast in opposition to the impending war, and he sent a diplomatic mission to Baghdad. The present Pope, Benedict XVI, also strongly criticized the US invasion of Iraq, both before and in the aftermath. His words: “There were not sufficient reasons to unleash a war against Iraq. To say nothing of the fact that, given the new weapons that make possible destructions that go beyond the combatant groups, today we should be asking ourselves if it is still licit to admit the very existence of a ‘just war’.”
My comment is a diversion? Well, I had to start somewhere, and there were so many falsehoods in your initial two posts. Your third post contains further inaccuracies, making it difficult to proceed with this discussion.
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First, when someone uses the expression “Blessed” for Cardinal Stepinac it becomes a matter of blasphemy any criticism of him which leads into a non-discussion.
Still, truth is truth, and if he couldn’t do much to stop the masacre of Serbs, he could have most certainly stopped their obscene forceful conversions, Wikipedia or no Wikipedia.
( we shouldn’t forget that the Inquisition used to be called “Santo Oficio")
Mr Zmirak’s comparing Russian Orthodox Church under Stalin with the Catholic Church under Pavelic is, frankly an abomination. Russian Church was totally destroyed by the Bolsheviks, remnants being completely infiltrated by the communist agents to serve as a front.
Just how many Catholic priests did Pavelich execute, or Hitler for that matter?
Another Zmirak’s absurdity is his implication of the Tsar in pogroms of the Jews. On the contrary, Nicola’s Government was thoroughly dependent on the money of Jewish western bankers, and the pogroms were highly embarassing for them. They went out of control because, lets be honest, Russian people disliked the Jews, just like Poles.
If Mr.Zmirak is really interested this subject, I would advise him reading Solzhenitsyn’s “Deux Siecles Ensemble” a monumental, well documented, two volume history of Judeo-Russian relation. For some reason (not too mysterious, though),it still hasn’t been translated into English ( pending an approval from AIPAC?).
Canonizing Nicolas II has to do, I think, with the tragic execution of him and his family. Not at all of glorifying his “presiding over the Black Hundreds” as Mr Zmiriac, fraternally, suggests.
(It is of some interest that Solzhenitsyn was against it).
Final thought. I suspect that all of you here, are either Seminarists or Catholic Priests. No offense intended.
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No seminarian nor Catholic priest I, Mr. RV, just an aging pensioner, father of five, contributor to a SERBIAN charitable organization, who never thought up to 48 or so hours ago that he would ever be writing in defense of Blessed Stepinac. (The title stems from his beatification by Pope John-Paul II.) You concede, sir, that he couldn’t stop the massacre of Serbs. Well according to Mr. Burleigh’s book, which Mr. Zmirak cited and which I researched today myself, Stepinac encouraged the baptism of Serbs and Jews in the Catholic Church with no questions asked in order to save their lives. He noted that when normal times returned, they would return to their own faiths. He was not encouraging forced conversions but feigned conversions. As far as how many priests Hitler killed - certainly in the hundreds, perhaps in the thousands, especially in Poland.
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Mr Higdon,
I’ve already heard that story and frankly, neither I nor anyone else who lived through those times could possibly believe it.
It is simply an appologia.
The Church was burning at the stake to save the soul, was it not?
Neither is believable that ‘thousands of Polish priests executed’.(there are some stories about Polish priests you’d rather not hear)
Being much younger, you are dissociated from those events except as tales. You can easily choose to believe the one you like. I cannot.
Anyhow, thanks for answering.
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As a Croatian who marched alongside thousands of Serbs in New York City to protest the unconscionable U.S. attack on Yugoslavia, and a long-time devotee of the liturgy of St. John Chrysostem, which I’ve attended many times at a Russian Catholic Church, I feel immune to charges that I am bigoted against the Orthodox. However, I would ask Mr. RV: How is Nicholas II, who was, excuse me, TSAR OF ALL THE RUSSIAS, less responsible for the persecution of Jews in his own empire than a mere archbishop who was trying, unsuccessfully, to restrain the butcheries committed by a totalitarian regime? And if the crimes of genocide committed against the Ukrainian Catholics are something that true Russian Orthodox reject as a work of Stalin, then why is the Orthodox Church refusing to return ANY of the parishes stolen from the despised “Uniates” at the point of Soviet bayonets? Every earthly branch of Christ’s Church has some blood on its hands. How about the Southern Baptists, founded to defend slavery? The Anglicans… well, I don’t need to go into that, do I? (Google “Carthusian martyrs” if you’re curious.) The Quakers have perhaps the least blood—but their role as Communist dupes during the Cold War isn’t pretty, nor is their almost total (except for some Meetings in the Western U.S.) abandonment of, well, Christianity. If we continue to allow these historical wrongs, real as they were, to divide us, we hand Satan an incalculable victory. And he’s doing just fine without our help, in my opinion.
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I’m not sure who I’m much younger than these days, Mr. RV, but thanks for the compliment. Maybe it’s my looks. On the subject of Nazi persecution of the Catholic Church in Poland including the murder of an estimated 3000 of the clergy, I’d suggest you check the following Wikipedia link -http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_War_II_atrocities_in_Poland
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Well, Mr Sarto, where is my answer to Mr. Zmirak I’ve just sent?
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Peter RV:
There is nothing in the system. I don’t see any reply to Zmirak’s post. Perhaps there was some technical glitch, or perhaps you simply screwed up. In any case, I don’t appreciate your sneering assumption that there’s some conspiracy to censor you, so I am simply closing this thread altogether. Please try to be more civil, if you wish to continue participating in forums.
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